Both in respect of morals and
education the clergy, during the period following the year 1450, showed
improvement over the age of the Avignon captivity and the papal schism.
Clerical practice in that former age was so lo that it was impossible for it to
go lower and any appearance of true religion remain. One of the healthy signs
of this latter period was that, in a spirit of genuine religious devotion,
Savonarola in Italy and such men in Germany as Busch, Thomas Murner, Geiler of
Strassburg, Sebastian Brant and the Benedictine abbot, Trithemius, held up to
condemnation, or ridicule, priestly incompetency and worldliness. The pictures,
which they joined Erasmus in drawing, were dark enough. Nevertheless, the
clergy both of the higher and lower grades included in its ranks many men who
truly sought the well-being of the people and set an example of purity of
conduct.

The first cause of the low
condition, for low it continued to be, was the impossible requirement of
celibacy. The infraction of this rule weakened the whole moral fibre of the
clerical order. A second cause is to be looked for in the seizure of the rich
ecclesiastical endowments by the aristocracy as its peculiar prize and securing
them for the sons of noble parentage without regard to their moral and
intellectual fitness. To the evils arising from these two causes must be added
the evils arising from the unblushing practice of pluralism. No help came from
Rome. The episcopal residences of Toledo, Constance, Paris, Mainz, Cologne and
Canterbury could not be expected to be models of domestic and religious order
when the tales of Boccaccio were being paralleled in the lives of the supreme
functionaries of Christendom at its centre.

The grave discussions of
clerical manners, carried on at the Councils of Constance and Basel, revealed
the disease without providing a cure. The proposition was even made by Cardinal
Zabarella and Gerson, in case further attempts to check priestly concubinage
failed, to concede to the clergy the privilege of marriage.1129 In the programme for a reformation of the Church, offered by
Sigismund at Basel, the concession was included and Pius II., one of the
attendants on that synod, declared the reasons for restoring the right of
matrimony to priests to be stronger in that day than were the reasons in a
former age for forbidding it. The need of a relaxation of the rigid rule found
recognition in the decrees of Eugenius IV., 1441, and Alexander VI., 1496,
releasing some of the military orders from the vow of chastity. Here and there,
priests like Lallier of Paris at the close of the 15th century, dared to
propose openly, as Wyclif had done a century before, its full abolition. But, for
making the proposal, the Sorbonne denied to Lallier the doctorate.

In Spain, the efforts of synods
and prelates to put a check upon clerical immorality accomplished little.
Finally, the secular power intervened and repeated edicts were issued by
Ferdinand and Isabella against priestly concubinage, 1480, 1491, 1502, 1503. So
energetic was the attempt at enforcement that, in districts, clerics complained
that the secular officials made forcible entrance into their houses and carried
off their women companions.1130 In his History
of the Spanish Inquisition, Dr. Lea devotes a special chapter to clerical
solicitation at the confessional. Episcopal deliverances show that the priests
were often illiterate and without even a knowledge of Latin. The prelates were
given to worldliness and the practice of pluralism. The revenues of the see of
Toledo were estimated at from 80,000 to 100,000 ducats, with patronage at the
disposal of its incumbent amounting to a like sum. A single instance must
suffice to show the extent to which pluralism in Spain was carried. Gonzalez de
Mendoza, while yet a child, held the curacy of Hita, at twelve was archdeacon
of Guadalajara, one of the richest benefices of Spain, and retained the
bishopric of Seguenza during his successive administrations of the
archbishoprics of Seville and Toledo. Gonzalez was a gallant knight and, in
1484, when he led the army which invaded Granada, he took with him his bastard
son, Rodrigo, who was subsequently married in great state in the presence of
Ferdinand and Isabella to Ferdinand’s niece. In 1476, when the archbishopric of
Saragossa became vacant, king Juan II. applied to Sixtus IV. to appoint his
son, Alfonzo, a child of six, to the place. Sixtus declined, but after a
spirited controversy preserved the king’s good-will by appointing the boy
perpetual administrator of the see.

In France, the bishop of Angers,
in an official address to Charles VIII., 1484, declared that the religious
orders had fallen below the level of the laity in their morals.1131 To give a case of extravagant pluralism, John, son of the duke of
Lorraine, 1498–1550, was appointed bishop-coadjutor of Metz, 1501, entering
into full possession seven years later, and, one after the other, he united
with this preferment the bishoprics of Toul, 1517, and Térouanne, 1518, Valence
and Die, 1521, Verdun, 1523, Alby, 1536, Macon soon after, Agen, 1541 and
Nantes, 1542. To these were added the archbishoprics of Narbonne, 1524, Rheims,
1533, and Lyons, 1537. He also held at least nine abbeys, including Cluny. He
resigned the sees of Verdun and Metz to a nephew, but resumed them in 1548 when
this nephew married Marguerite d’Egmont.1132 In 1518, he received the red hat. During the 15th century one boy
of 10 and another of 17 filled the bishopric of Geneva. A loyal Romanist, Soeur
Jeanne de Jussie, writing after the beginning of the 16th century, testifies to
the dissoluteness of the bishops and clergy of the Swiss city and charged them
with living in adultery.1133

In Germany, although as a result
of the labors of the Mystics the ecclesiastical condition was much better, the
moral and intellectual unfitness was such that it calls forth severe criticism
from Catholic as well as Protestant historians. The Catholic, Janssen, says
that "the profligacy of the clergy at German cathedrals, as well as their
rudeness and ignorance, was proverbial. The complaints which have come down to
us from the 15th century of the bad morals of the German clergy are exceedingly
numerous." Ficker, a Protestant,
speaks of "the extraordinary immorality to which priests and monks yielded
themselves." And Bezold, likewise
a Protestant, says that "in the 15th century the worldliness of the clergy
reached a height not possible to surpass."1134 The contemporary Jacob Wimpheling, set forth probably the true
state of the case. He was severe upon the clergy and yet spoke of many
excellent prelates, canons and vicars, known for their piety and good works. He
knew of a German cleric who held at one time 20 livings, including 8 canonries.
To the archbishopric of Mainz, Albrecht of Hohenzollern added the see of
Halberstadt and the archbishopric of Magdeburg. For his promotion to the see of
Mainz he paid 30,000 gulden, money he borrowed from the Fuggers.

The bishops were charged with
affecting the latest fashions in dress and wearing the finest textures, keeping
horses and huntings dogs, surrounding themselves with servants and pages,
allowing their beards and hair to grow long, and going about in green- and
red-colored shoes and shoes punctured with holes through which ribbons were
drawn. They were often seen in coats of mail, and accoutred with helmets and
swords, and the tournament often witnessed them entered in the lists.1135

The custom of reserving the
higher offices of the Church for the aristocracy was widely sanctioned by law.
As early as 1281 in Worms and 1294 in Osnabruck, no one could be dean who was
not of noble lineage. The office of bishop and prebend stalls were limited to
men of noble birth by Basel, 1474, Augsburg, 1475, Münster and Paderborn, 1480,
and Osnabruck, 1517. The same rule prevailed in Mainz, Halberstadt, Meissen,
Merseburg and other dioceses. At the beginning of the 16th century, it was the
established custom in Germany that no one should be admitted to a cathedral
chapter who could not show 16 ancestors who had joined in the tournament and,
as early as 1474, the condition of admission to the chapter of Cologne was that
the candidate should show 32 members of his family of noble birth. Of the 228
bishops who successively occupied the 32 German sees from 1400–1517, all but 13
were noblemen. The eight occupants of the see of Münster, 1424–1508, were all
counts or dukes. So it was with 10 archbishops of Mainz, 1419–1514, the 7
bishops of Halberstadt, 1407–1513, and the 5 archbishops of Cologne, 1414–1515.1136 This custom of keeping the high places for men of noble birth was
smartly condemned by Geiler of Strassburg and other contemporaries. Geiler
declared that Germany was soaked with the folly that to the bishoprics, not the
more pious and learned should be promoted but only those who, "as they
say, belong to good families." It
remained for the Protestant Reformation to reassert the democratic character of
the ministry.

A high standard could not be
expected of the lower ranks of the clergy where the incumbents of the high
positions held them, not by reason of piety or intellectual attainments but as
the prize of birth and favoritism. The wonder is, that there was any genuine
devotion left among the lower priesthood. Its ranks were greatly overstocked.
Every family with several sons expected to find a clerical position for one of
them and often the member of the family, least fitted by physical
qualifications to make his way in the world, was set apart for religion. Here
again Geiler of Strassburg applied his lash of indignation, declaring that, as
people set apart for St. Velten the chicken that had the pox and for St.
Anthony the pig that was affected with disease, so they devoted the least
likely of their children to the holy office.

The German village clergy of the
period were as a rule not university bred. The chronicler, Felix Faber of Ulm,
in 1490 declared that out of 1000 priests scarcely one had ever seen a
university town and a baccalaureate or master was a rarity seldom met with.
With a sigh, people of that age spoke of the well-equipped priest of, the good
old times."

From the Alps to Scandinavia,
concubinage was widely practised and in parts of Germany, such as Saxony,
Bavaria, Austria and the Tirol, it was general. The region, where there was the
least of it, was the country along the Rhine. In parts of Switzerland and other
localities, parishes, as a measure of self-defence, forced their young pastors
to take concubines. Two of the Swiss Reformers, Leo Jud and Bullinger, were
sons of priests and Zwingli, a prominent priest, was given to incontinence
before starting on his reformatory career. It was a common saying that the Turk
of clerical sensualism within was harder to drive out than the Turk from the
East.

How far the conscientious
effort, made in Germany in the last years of the Middle Ages to reform the
convents, was attended with success is a matter of doubt. John Busch labored
most energetically in that direction for nearly fifty years in Westphalia,
Thuringia and other parts. The things that he records seem almost past belief.
Nunneries, here and there, were no better than brothels. In cases, they were
habitually visited by noblemen. The experience is told of one nobleman who was
travelling with his servant and stopped over night at a convent. After the
evening meal, the nuns cleared the main room and, dressed in fine apparel,
amused their visitor by exhibitions of dancing.1137 Thomas Murner went so far as to say that convents for women had
all been turned into refuges for people of noble birth.1138 The dancing during the sessions of the Diet of Cologne, 1505, was
opened by the archbishop and an abbess, and nuns from St. Ursula’s and St.
Mary’s, the king Maximilian looking on. Preachers, like Geiler of Strassburg,
cried out against the moral dangers which beset persons taking the monastic
vow.1139 The
cloistral life came to be known as "the compulsory vocation." As the time of the Reformation approached,
there was no lessening of the outcry against the immorality of the clergy and
convents, as appears from the writings of Ulrich von Hutten and Erasmus.

The practice of priestly
concubinage, uncanonical though it was, bishops were quite ready to turn into a
means of gain, levying a tax upon it. In the diocese of Bamberg, a toll of 5
gulden was exacted for every child born to a priest and, in a single year, the
tax is said to have brought in the considerable sum of 1,500 gulden. In 1522, a
similar tax of 4 gulden brought into the treasury of the bishop of Constance,
7,500 gulden. The same year, complaint was made to the pope by the Diet of
Nürnberg of the reckless lawlessness of young priests in corrupting women and
of the annual tax levied in most dioceses upon all the clergy without
distinction whether they kept concubines or not.1140 It is not surprising, in view of these facts, that Luther called
upon monks and nuns unable to avoid incontinence of thought, to come forth from
the monasteries and marry. On the other hand, it must not be forgotten that no
plausible charge of incontinence was made against the Reformer.

If we turn to England, we are
struck with the great dearth of contemporary religious literature, 1450–1517,
as compared with Germany.1141 Few
writings have come down to us from which to form a judgment of the condition of
the clergy. Our deductions must be drawn in part from the testimonies of the
English Humanists and Reformers and from the records of the visitations of
monasteries and also their suppression under Henry VIII. In a document, drawn
up at the request of Henry V. by the University of Oxford, 1414, setting forth
the need of a reformation of the Church, one of the articles pronounced the
"undisguised profligacy of the clergy to be the scandal of the
Church."1142 In the
middle of the century, 1455, Archbishop Bourchier’s Commission for Reforming
the Clergy spoke of the marriage and concubinage of the secular clergy and the
gross ignorance which, in quarters, marked them. In the latter part of the
century, 1489, the investigation of the convents, undertaken by Archbishop
Morton, uncovered an unsavory state of affairs. The old abbey of St. Albans,
for example, had degenerated till it was little better than a house of
prostitution for monks. In two priories under the abbey’s jurisdiction, the
nuns had been turned out to give place to avowed courtesans. The Lollards
demanded the privilege of wedlock for priests. When, in 1494, 30 of their
number were arraigned by Robert Blacater, archbishop of Glasgow, one of the
charges against them was their assertion that priests had wives in the
primitive Church.1143 Writing
at the very close of the 15th century, Colet exclaimed, "Oh, the
abominable impiety of those miserable priests, of whom this age of ours
contains a great multitude, who fear not to rush from the arms of some foul
harlot into the temple of the Church, to the altar of Christ, to the mysteries
of God."1144 The
famous tract, the Beggars’ Petition, written on the eve of the British
Reformation, accused the clergy of having no other serious occupation than the
destruction of the peace of family life and the corruption of women.1145

As for the practice of plural
livings, it was perhaps as much in vogue in England as in Germany. Dr.
Sherbourne, Colet’s predecessor as dean of St. Paul’s, was a notable example of
a pluralist, but in this respect was exceeded by Morton and Wolsey. As for the
ignorance of the English clergy, it is sufficient to refer to the testimony of
Bishop Hooper who, during his visitation in Gloucester, 1551, found 168 of 811
clergymen unable to repeat the Ten Commandments, 40 who could not tell where
the Lord’s Prayer was to be found and 31 unable to give the author.1146

In Scotland, the state of the
clergy in pre-Reformation times was probably as low as in any other part of
Western Europe.1147 John
IV.’s bastard son was appointed bishop of St. Andrews at 16 and the
illegitimate sons of James V., 1513–1542, held the five abbeys of Holyrood,
Kelso, St. Andrews, Melrose and Coldingham. Bishops lived openly in concubinage
and married their daughters into the ranks of the nobility. In the marriage
document, certifying the nuptials of Cardinal Beaton’s eldest daughter to the
Earl of Crawford, 1546, the cardinal called her his child. On the night of his
murder, he is said to have been with his favorite mistress, Marion Ogilvie.

Side by side with the decline of
the monastic institutions, there prevailed among the monks of the 15th century
a most exaggerated notion of the sanctifying influence of the monastic vow.
According to Luther, the monks of his day recognized two grades of Christians,
the perfect and the imperfect. To the former the monastics belonged. Their vow
was regarded as a second baptism which cleared those who received it from all
stain, restored them to the divine image and put them in a class with the
angels. Luther was encouraged by his superiors to feel, after he had taken the
vow, that he was as pure as a child. This second regeneration had been taught
by St. Bernard and Thomas Aquinas. Thomas said that it may with reason be
affirmed that any one "entering religion," that is, taking the
monastic vow, thereby received remission of sins.1148

§ 74. Preaching.

The two leading preachers of
Europe during the last 50 years of the Middle Ages were Jerome Savonarola of
Florence and John Geiler of Strassburg. Early in the 15th century, Gerson was
led by the ignorance of the clergy to recommend a reduction of preaching,1149but in the period just before
the Reformation there was a noticeable revival of the practice of preaching in
Germany and a movement in that direction was felt in England. Erasmus, as a cosmopolitan
scholar made an appeal for the function of the pulpit, which went to all
portions of Western Europe.

In Germany, the importance of
the sermon was emphasized by synodal decrees and homiletic manuals. Such synods
were the synods of Eichstädt, 1463, Bamberg, 1491, Basel, 1503, Meissen, 1504.
Surgant’s noted Handbook on the Art of Preaching praised the sermon as
the instrument best adapted to lead the people to repentance and inflame
Christian love and called it "the way of life, the ladder of virtue and
the gate of paradise."1150 It was pronounced as much a sin to let a word from the pulpit fall
unheeded as to spill a drop of the sacramental wine. In the penitential books
and the devotional manuals of the time, stress was laid upon the duty of
attending preaching, as upon the mass. Those who left church before the sermon
began were pronounced deserving excommunication. Wolff’s penitential manual of
1478 made the neglect of the sermon a violation of the 4th commandment. The
efficacy of sermons was vouched for in the following story. A good man met the
devil carrying a bag full of boxes packed with salves. Holding up a black box,
the devil said that he used it to put people to sleep during the preaching
service. The preachers, he continued, greatly interfered with his work, and
often by a single sermon snatched from him persons he had held in his power for
30 or 40 years.1151

By the end of the 15th century,
all the German cities and most of the larger towns had regular preaching.1152 It was a common thing to endow pulpits, as in Mainz, 1465, Basel,
1469, Strassburg, 1478, Constance, Augsburg, Stuttgart and other cities. The
popular preachers drew large audiences. So it was with Geiler of Strassburg,
whose ministry lasted 30 years. 10,000 are said to have gathered to hear the
sermons of the barefooted monk, Jacob Mene of Cologne, when he held forth at
Frankfurt, the people standing in the windows and crowding up against the organ
to hear him. It was Mene’s practice to preach a sermon from 7–8 in the morning,
and again after the noon meal. On a certain Good Friday he prolonged his effort
five hours, from 3–8 P. M. According to Luther, towns were glad to give
itinerant monks 100 gulden for a series of Lenten discourses.

Other signs of the increased
interest felt in sermons were the homiletic cyclopaedias of the time furnishing
materials derived from the Bible, the Fathers, classic authors and from the
realm of tale and story. To these must be added the plenaria, collections from the Gospels
and Epistles with glosses and comments. The plenarium of Guillermus, professor in Paris, went through 75
editions before 1500. Collections of model sermons were also issued, some of
which had an extensive circulation. The collection of John Nider, d. 1439,
passed through 17 editions. His texts were invariably subjected to a threefold
division. The collection of the Franciscan, John of Werden, who died at Cologne
about 1450, passed through 25 editions. John Herolt’s volume of Sermons of a
Disciple — Sermones
discipuli —
went through 41 editions before 1500 and is computed to have had a circulation
of no less than 40,000 copies.1153 One of the most popular of the collections called Parati sermones—The Ready Man’s
Sermons —
appeared anonymously. Its title was taken from 1 Peter 4:6, "ready—paratus — to judge the quick and the
dead" and Ps. 119:60, "I made haste [ready] and delayed not to
observe thy commandments." In
setting forth the words "Be not unwise but understanding what the will of
the Lord is" the author says that such wisdom is taught by the animals. 1.
By the lion who brushes out his paw-prints with his tail so that the hunter is
thrown off the track. So we should with penance erase the marks of our sins
that the devil may not find us out. 2. The serpent which closes both ears to
the seducer, one ear with his tail and the other by holding it to the ground.
Against the devil we should shut our ears by the two thoughts of death and
eternity. 3. The ant from which we learn industry in making provision for the
future. 4. A certain kind of fish which sucks itself fast to the rock in times
of storm. So we should adhere closely to the rock, Christ Jesus, by thoughts of
his passion and thus save ourselves from the surging of the waves of the world.
Such materials show that the homiletic instinct was alert and the preachers
anxious to catch the attention of the people and impart biblical truth.

The sermons of the German
preachers of the 15th century were written now in Latin, now in German. The
more famous of the Latin sermonizers were Gabriel Biel, preacher in Mainz and
then professor in Tübingen, d. 1495, and Jacob Jüterbock, 1883–1465, Carthusian
prior in Erfurt and professor in the university in that city.1154 Among the notable preachers who preached in German were John
Herolt of Basel, already mentioned; the Franciscan John Gritsch whose sermons
reached 26 editions before 1500; the Franciscan, John Meder of Basel whose
Lenten discourses on the Prodigal Son of the year 1494 reached 36 editions and
Ulrich Krafft, pastor in Ulm, 1500 to 1516, and author of the two volumes, The
Spiritual Battle and Noah’s Ark.

More famous than all others was
Geiler of Strassburg, usually called from his father’s birthplace, Geiler of
Kaisersberg, born in Schaffhausen, 1445, died in Strassburg, 1510. He and his
predecessor, Bertholdt of Regensburg, have the reputation of being the most
powerful preachers of mediaeval Germany. For more than a quarter of a century
he stood in the cathedral pulpit of Strassburg, the monarch of preachers in the
North. After pursuing his university studies in Freiburg and Basel, Geiler was
made professor at Freiburg, 1476. His pulpit efforts soon made him a marked
man. In accepting the call as preacher in the cathedral at Strassburg, he
entered into a contract to preach every Sunday and on all festival and fast
days. He continued to fill the pulpit till within two months of his death and
lies interred in the cathedral where he preached.1155

"The Trumpet of
Strassburg," as Geiler was called, gained his fame as a preacher of moral
and social reforms. He advocated no doctrinal changes. Called upon, 1500, to
explain his public declaration that the city councillors were "all of the
devil," he issued 21 articles demanding that games of chance be
prohibited, drinking halls closed, the Sabbath and festival days observed, the
hospitals properly cared for and monkish mendicancy regulated.

He was a preacher of the people
and now amused, now stung them, by anecdotes, plays on words, descriptions,
proverbs, sallies of wit, humor and sarcasm.1156 He attacked popular follies and fashions and struck at the priests
"many of whom never said mass," and at the convents in which
"neither religion nor virtue was found and the living was lax, lustful,
dissolute and fall of all levity."1157 Mediaeval superstition he served up to his hearers in good doses.
He was a firm believer in astrology, ghosts and witches.

Geiler’s style may seem rude to
the polite age in which we live, but it reached the ear of his own time. The
high as well as the low listened. Maximilian went to hear Geiler when he was in
Strassburg. No one could be in doubt about the preacher’s meaning. In a series
of 65 passion sermons, he elaborated a comparison between Christ and a ginger
cake—the German Lebkuchen. Christ is composed of the bean meal of the deity, the
old fruit meal of the body and the wheat meal of the soul. To these elements is
added the honey of compassion. He was thrust into the oven of affliction and is
divided by preachers into many parts and distributed among the people. In other
sermons, he compared perfect Christians to sausages.

In seven most curious discourses
on Der Hase im Pfeffer an idiomatic expression for That’s the Rub—based
on Prov. 30:26, "The coney is a weak folk," he made 14 comparisons
between the coney and the good Christian. The coney runs better up hill than
down, as a good Christian should do. The coney has long ears as also a
Christian should have, especially monastics, attending to what God has to say.
The coney must be roasted; and so must also the Christian pass through the
furnace of trial. The coney being a lank beast must be cooked in lard, so also
must the Christian be surrounded with love and devotion lest he be scorched in
the furnace. In 64 discourses, preached two years before his death, Geiler
brought out the spiritual lessons to be derived from ants and in another series
he elaborated the 25 sins of the tongue. In a course of 20 sermons to business
men, he depicted the six market days and the devil as a pedler(sic) going about
selling his wares. He preached 17 sermons on the lion in which the king of
beasts was successively treated as the symbol of the good man, the worldly man,
Christ and the devil; 12 of these sermons were devoted to the ferocious
activities of the devil. A series on the Human Tree comprised no less than 163
discourses running from the beginning of Lent, 1495, to the close of Lent,
1496.

During the last two years of the
15th century, Geiler preached 111 homilies on Sebastian Brant’s Ship of Fools Narren-schiff
— all drawn
from the text Eccles. 1:15 as it reads in the Vulgate, "the fools are
without number." Through Geiler’s
intervention Brant had been brought to Strassburg from Basel, where he was
professor. His famous work, which is a travesty upon the follies of his time,
employed the figure of a ship for the transport of his fools because it was the
largest engine of transportation the author knew of. Very humorously Brant
placed himself in the moderator’s chair while all the other fools were gathered
in front of him. He himself took the rôle of the Book-fool. Among other follies
which are censured are the doings of the mendicants, the traffic in relics and
indulgences and the multiplication of benefices in single hands.1158 Geiler’s homilies equal Brant’s poetry in humor. Both were true to
life. No preacher of the Middle Ages held the popular ear so long as Geiler of
Strassburg and no popular poet, not even Will Langland, more effectually wrote
for the masses than Sebastian Brant.

In this period, the custom came
to be quite general to preach from the nave of the church instead of from the
choir railing. Preachers limited their discourses by hour-glasses, a custom
later transplanted to New England.1159 Sermons were at times unduly extended. Gerhard Groote sometimes
preached for three hours during Lent and John Gronde extended some of his discourses
to six hours, mercifully, however, dividing them into two parts with a brief
breathing-spell between, profitable as may well be surmised alike to the
preacher and the hearers. Geiler, who at one time had been inclined to preach
on without regard to time, limited his discourses to a single hour.

The criticisms which preachers
passed upon the customs of the day show that human nature was pretty much the
same then as it is now and that the "good old times" are not to be
sought for in that age. All sorts of habits were held up to ridicule and scorn.
Drunkenness and gluttony, the dance and the street comedy, the dress of women
and the idle lounging of rich men’s sons, usury and going to church to make a
parade were among the subjects dwelt upon. Again and again, Geiler of
Strassburg returned to the lazy sons of the rich who spent their time in
retailing scandals and doing worse, more silly in their dress than the women,
fops who "thought themselves somebody because their fathers were
rich." He also took special notice
of women and their fripperies. He condemned their belts, sometimes made of silk
and adorned with gold, costing as much as 40 or 50 gulden, their padded busts
and their extensive wardrobes, enabling them to wear for a week at a time two
different garments each day and a third one for a dancing party or the play. He
launched out against their long hair, left to fall down over the back and
crowned with ribbons or small caps such as the men wore. As examples of
warning, Absalom and Holofernes were singled out, the former caught by his hair
in the branches of the tree and Holofernes ensnared by the adornments of
Judith. Geiler called upon the city authorities to come to the help of society
and the preacher and legislate against such evils.1160

Another preacher, Hollen,
condemned the long trails which women wore as "the devil’s wagon,"
for neither men nor angels but only the devil has a caudal appendage. As for
dancing, especially the round dances, the devil was the head concertmaster at
such entertainments and the higher the dancers jumped, the deeper their fall
into hell and, the more firmly they held on to each other with their hands, the
more closely did the devil tighten his hold upon them. Dancing was represented
by the preachers as an occasion of much profligacy.

In ridiculing the preaching of
his day, Erasmus held forth the preachers’ ignorance, their incongruous
introductions, their use of stories from all departments without any
discrimination, their old women’s tales and the frivolous topics they chose—aniles fabulae et questiones
frivolse. A
famous passage in which the great scholar disparages the preaching of the monks
and friars begins with the words: —

All their preaching is mere
stage-playing, and their delivery the very transports of ridicule and drollery.
Good Lord! how mimical are these gestures!
What heights and falls in their voice!
What toning, what bawling, what singing, what squeaking, what grimaces,
making of months, apes’ faces, and distorting of their countenance; and this
art of oratory as a choice mystery, they convey down by tradition to one
another.1161

Erasmus deserves credit for
discerning the need of the times, and recommending the revival of the practice
of preaching and the mission of preachers to the heathen nations. His views
were set forth in the Ecclesiastes or Preacher, a work written
during the Freiburg period and filling 275 pages,1162each double the size of the
pages of the hardcopy volume. The chief purpose of preaching he defined to be
instruction. Every preacher is a herald of Christ, who was himself the great
preacher. The office of preaching is superior in dignity to the office of
kings. "Among the charisms of the Spirit, none is more noble and
efficacious than preaching. To be a dispenser of the celestial philosophy and a
messenger of the divine will is excelled by no office in the church." It is quite in accord with Erasmus’ high
regard for the teaching function, that he magnifies the instructional element
of the sermon. Writing to Sapidus, 1516, he said, "to be a schoolmaster is
next to being a king."1163

Of the English pulpit, there is little
to say. We hear of preaching at St. Paul’s Cross and at other places, but there
is no evidence that preaching was usual. No volumes of English sermons issued
from the printing-press. Colet is the only English preacher of the 15th century
of historical importance. The churchly counsel given to priests to impart
instruction to the people, issued by the Lambeth synod of 1281, stands almost
solitary. In 1466, Archbishop Nevill of York did no more than to repeat this
legislation.

In Scotland the history of the
pulpit begins with Knox. Dr. Blaikie remarks that, for the three centuries
before the Reformation, scarcely a trace of Christian preaching can be found in
Scotland worthy the name. The country had no Wyclif, as it had no Anselm.1164 Hamilton and Wishart, Knox’s immediate forerunners, were laymen.

The Abbé Dr. Gasquet in a
chapter on A Forgotten English Preacher in his Old Eng. Bible and other
Essays gives extracts from the MS. sermon of Thomas Branton, Bishop of
Rochester, 1372–1389. After saying that we know very little about mediaeval
preaching in England, Dr. Gasquet, p. 54, remarks that it is perhaps just as
well, as the sermons were probably dull and that "the modern sermon"
has to be endured as a necessary evil. In his chapter on Teaching and
Preaching, pp. 244–284, in his Eve of the Reformation, the same author
returns to the subject, but the chapter itself gives the strongest evidence of
the literary barrenness of the English Church in the closing years of the
Middle Ages and the dearth of preaching and public instruction. By far the
larger part of the chapter, pp. 254–280, is taken up with quotations from Sir
Thomas More, the tract Dives and Pauper and other tracts, to show that
the doctrine of the worship of images and saints was not taught in its crass
form and with a statement of the usefulness of miracle-plays as a means of
popular religious instruction. Dr. Gasquet lays stress upon the "simple
instruction" given by the English priesthood in the Middle Ages as opposed
to formal sermons which he confesses "were probably by no means so
frequent as in these times." He
makes the astounding assertion, p. 245, that religions instruction as a means
of social and moral improvement was not one of the primary aims of the
Reformation. The very opposite is proved by the efforts of Luther, Calvin and
Knox to secure the establishment of schools in every hamlet and the catechisms
which the two former prepared and the numerous catechisms prepared by their
fellow Reformers. And what of their habit of constant preaching? Luther preached day after day. One of the
first signs of the Reformation in Geneva was that St. Pierre and St. Gervaise
were opened for preaching daily. Calvin incorporated into his ecclesiastical
polity as one of the orders the ministry, the teaching body.

§ 75. Doctrinal Reformers.

A group of theologians appeared
in Northwestern Germany who, on the one hand, were closely associated by locality
and training with the Brothers of the Common Life and, on the other,
anticipated the coming age by the doctrinal reforms which they proposed. On the
latter account, John of Goch, John of Wesel and Wessel of Gansfort have been
properly classed with Wyclif and Huss as Reformers before the Reformation.1165 Erasmus has no place at their side for, with his satire on ceremonies
and church conditions, the question is always raised of his sincerity.
Savonarola suggested no doctrinal changes. Among the new views emphasized by
one or all of these three men were the final authority of the Scriptures, the
fallibility of the pope, the sufficiency of divine grace for salvation
irrespective of priestly mediation, and the distinction between the visible and
the invisible Church. However, but for the Protestant Reformation, it is not
probable their voices would have been heard beyond the century in which they
lived.

John Pupper, 1400–1475, usually
called John of Goch from his birthplace, a hamlet on the lower Rhine near
Cleves, seems to have been trained in one of the schools of the Brothers of the
Common Life, and then studied in Cologne and perhaps in Paris. He founded a
house of Augustinians near Mecheln, remaining at its head till his death. His
writings were not published till after the beginning of the Reformation. He
anticipated that movement in asserting the supreme authority of the Bible. The
Fathers are to be accepted only so far as they follow the canonical Scriptures.
In contrast to the works of the philosophers and the Schoolmen, the Bible is a
book of life; theirs, books of death.1166 He also called in question the merit of monastic vows and the
validity of the distinction between the higher and lower morality upon which
monasticism laid stress. What is included under the higher morality is within
the reach of all Christians and not the property of monks only. He renounced
the Catholic view of justification without stating with clearness the
evangelical theory.1167

John Ruchrath von Wesel, d.
1481, attacked the hierarchy and indulgences and was charged on his trial with
calling in question almost all the distinctive Roman Catholic tenets. He was
born in Oberwesel on the Rhine between Mainz and Coblentz. He taught at the
University of Erfurt and, in 1458, was chosen its vice-rector. Luther bore
testimony to his influence when he said, "I remember how Master John
Wesalia ruled the University of Erfurt by his writings through the study of
which I also became a master."1168 Leaving Erfurt, he was successively professor in Basel and
cathedral preacher in Mainz and Worms.

In 1479, Wesel was arraigned for
heresy before the Inquisition at Mainz.1169 Among the charges were that the Scriptures are alone a trustworthy
source of authority; the names of the predestinate are written in the book of
life and cannot be erased by a priestly ban; indulgences do not profit; Christ
is not pleased with festivals of fasting, pilgrimages or priestly celibacy;
Christ’s body can be in the bread without any change of the bread’s substance:
pope and councils are not to be obeyed if they are out of accord with the Scriptures;
he whom God chooses will be saved irrespective of pope and priests, and all who
have faith will enjoy as much blessedness as prelates. Wesel also made the
distinction between the visible and the invisible Church and defined the Church
as the aggregation of all the faithful who are bound together by love—collectio omnium fidelium
caritate copulatorum. In his trial, he was accused of having had communication with the
Hussites. In matters of historical criticism, he was also in advance of his
age, casting doubt upon some of the statements of the Athanasian Creed,
abandoning the application of the term Catholic to the Apostles’ Creed and
pronouncing the addition of the filioque clause—and from the Son—unwarranted. The doctrines of
indulgences and the fund of merit he pronounced unscriptural and pious frauds.
The elect are saved wholly through the grace of God—sola Dei gratia salvantur electi.

At the request of Diether of
Isenburg, archbishop of Mainz, the Universities of Cologne and Heidelberg sent
delegates to the trial. The accused was already an old man, leaning on his
staff, when he appeared before the tribunal. Lacking strength to stand by the
heretical articles, he agreed to submit "to mother Church and the
teachings of the doctors." A
public recantation in the cathedral followed, and his books were burnt.1170 These punishments were not sufficient to expiate his offence and
he was sentenced to imprisonment for life in the Augustinian convent of Mainz,
where he died.

Among Wesel’s reported sayings,
which must have seemed most blasphemous to the devout churchman of the time,
are the following: "The consecrated oil is not better than the oil used
for your cakes in the kitchen."
"If you are hungry, eat. You may eat a good capon on Friday." "If Peter established fasting, it was
in order that he might get more for his fish" on fast days. To certain
monastics, he said, "Not religion" (that is, monastic vows) "but
God’s grace saves," religio nullum salvat sed gratia Dei.

A still nearer approach to the
views of the Reformers was made by Wessel Gansfort, commonly called John
Wessel,1171born in Groningen, 1420, died 1489. In his
Preface to Wessel’s writings, 1522, Luther said, "If I had read Wessel
earlier, my enemies might have said that Luther drew everything from Wessel, so
well do our two minds agree."
Wessel attended school at Zwolle, where he met Thomas à Kempis of the neighboring
convent of Mt. St. Agnes. The story ran that when Thomas pointed him to the
Virgin, Wessel replied, "Father, why did you not rather point me to Christ
who calls the heavy-laden to himself?"
He continued his studies in Cologne, where he took Greek and Hebrew, in
Heidelberg and in Paris. He declined a call to Heidelberg. In 1470, we find him
in Rome. The story went that, when Sixtus IV. invited him to follow the common
custom of visitors to the Vatican and make a request, the German student replied
that he would like to have a Hebrew or Greek manuscript of the Bible from the
Vatican. The pope, laughing, said, "Why did you not ask for a bishopric,
you fool?" Wessel’s reply was
"Because I do not need it."

Wessel spent some time in Basel,
where he met Reuchlin. In 1473, the bishop of Utrecht wrote that many were
seeking his life and invited him back to Holland. His last years, from 1474 on,
Wessel spent with the Brothers of the Common Life at Mt. St. Agnes, and in the
nuns’ convent at Groningen. There, in the place of his birth, he lies buried.
His last words were, "I know no one save Jesus, the Crucified."

Wessel enjoyed a reputation for
great learning. He escaped arraignment at the hands of the Inquisition, but was
violently attacked after his death in a tract on indulgences, by Jacob Hoeck,
Dean of Naaldwyk. None of Wessel’s writings were published till after the
outbreak of the Reformation. Although he did not reach the doctrine of
justification by faith, he declared that pope and councils may err and he
defined the Church to be the communion of the saints. The unity of the Church
does not lie in the pope—unitas ecclesiae sub uno papa tantum accidentalis est, adeo ut non sit
necessaria. He
laid stress upon the faith of the believer in partaking of the eucharist or,
rather, upon his hunger and thirst after the sacrament. But he did not deny the
sacrifice of the mass or the validity of the communion under one kind. He gave
up the judicial element in priestly absolution.1172 There is no such thing as works of supererogation, for each is
under obligation to do all he can and to do less is to sin. The prerogative of
the keys belongs to all believers. Plenary indulgences are a detestable
invention of the papacy to fill its treasury.

In 1522, a Dutch lawyer, von
Hoen, joining with other Netherlanders, sent Luther a copy of some of Wessel’s
writings.1173 In the
preface which the Reformer wrote for the Wittenberg edition, he said that, as
Elijah of old, so he had felt himself to be the only one left of the prophets
of God but he had found out that God had also had his prophets in secret like
Wessel.

These three German theologians,
Goch, Wesel and Wessel, were quietly searching after the marks of the true
Church and the doctrine of justification by faith in Christ alone. Without
knowing it, they were standing on the threshold of the Reformation.

§ 76. Girolamo Savonarola.

Ecce
gladius Domini super terram cito et velociter.

In the closing decade of the
15th century the city of Florence seemed to be on the eve of becoming a model
municipality, a pattern of Christian morals, a theocracy in which Christ was
acknowledged as sovereign. In the movement looking towards this change, the
chief actor was Jerome Savonarola, prior of the

[picture with title below]

Savonarola

Dominican convent of St. Mark’s, the most imposing
preacher of the Middle Ages and one of the most noteworthy preachers of
righteousness since St. Paul. Against the dark moral background of his
generation he appears as a broad sheet of northern light with its coruscations,
mysterious and protentous, but also quickly disappearing. His message was the
prophet’s cry, "Who shall abide the day of His coming and who shall stand
when He appeareth?"

Savonarola, born in Ferrara
Sept. 21, 1452, died in Florence May 23, 1498, was the third of seven children.
Choosing his grandfather’s profession, he entered upon the study of medicine,
from which he was turned away by a deepening impression of the corruption of
society and disappointment at the refusal of a family of Strozzi, living at
Ferrara, to give him their daughter in marriage. At the age of 23, he secretly
left his father’s house and betook himself to Bologna, where he assumed the
Dominican habit. Two days after his arrival in Bologna, he wrote thus to his
father explaining the reason of his abrupt departure.

I could not endure any longer
the wickedness of the blinded peoples of Italy. Virtue I saw despised
everywhere and vices exalted and held in honor. With great warmth of heart, I
made daily a short prayer to God that He might release me from this vale of
tears. ’Make known to me the way,’ I cried, ’the way in which I should walk for
I lift up my soul unto Thee,’ and God in His infinite mercy showed me the way,
unworthy as I am of such distinguishing grace.1174

He begged his father to console
his mother and referred him to a poem by his pen on the contempt of the world,
which he had left among his papers. In this letter and several letters to his
mother, which are extant, is shown the young monk’s warm affection for his
parents and his brothers and sisters.

In the convent, the son studied
Augustine and Thomas Aquinas and became familiar with the Scriptures, sections
of which he committed to memory. Two copies of the Bible are extant in
Florence, containing copious notes in Savonarola’s own handwriting, made on the
margin, between the printed lines and on added leaves.1175 After his appointment as provincial, he emphasized the study of
the Bible in Hebrew and Greek.

In 1481, he was sent to
Florence, where he became an inmate of St. Mark’s. The convent had been rebuilt
by Cosimo de Medici and its walls illuminated by the brush of Fra Angelico. At
the time of Savonarola’s arrival, the city was at the height of its fame as a
seat of culture and also as the place of lighthearted dissipation under the
brilliant patronage of Lorenzo the Magnificent.

The young monk’s first efforts
in the pulpit in Florence were a failure. The congregation at San Lorenzo,
where he preached during the Lenten season, fell to 25 persons. Fra Mariano da
Gennazzano, an Augustinian, was the popular favorite. The Dominican won his
first fame by his Lenten sermons of 1486, when he preached at Brescia on the
Book of Revelation. He represented one of the 24 elders rising up and
pronouncing judgments upon the city for its wickedness. In 1489, he was invited
back to Florence by Lorenzo at the suggestion of Pico della Mirandola, who had
listened to Savonarola’s eloquence at Reggio. During the remaining nine years
of his life, the city on the Arno was filled with Savonarola’s personality.
With Catherine of Siena, he shares the fame of being the most religious of the
figures that have walked its streets. During the first part of this short
period, he had conflict with Lorenzo and, during the second, with Alexander
VI., all the while seeking by his startling warnings and his prophecies to
bring about the regeneration of the city and make it a model of civic and
social righteousness. From Aug. 1, 1490, when he appeared in the pulpit of St.
Mark’s, the people thronged to hear him whether he preached there or in the
cathedral. In 1491, he was made prior of his convent. To preaching he added
writings in the department of philosophy and tracts on humility, prayer and the
love of Jesus. He was of middle height, dark complexion, lustrous eyes dark
gray in color, thick lips and aquiline nose. His features, which of themselves
would have been called coarse, attracted attention by the serious contemplative
expression which rested upon them, and the flash of his eye.

Savonarola’s sermons were like
the flashes of lightning and the reverberations of thunder. It was his mission
to lay the axe at the root of dissipation and profligacy rather than to depict
the consolations of pardon and communion with God. He drew more upon the
threatenings of the divine wrath than upon the refreshing springs of the divine
compassion. Tender descriptions of the divine love and mercy were not wanting
in his sermons, but the woes pronounced upon the sinfulness of his time
exceeded the gentle appeals. He was describing his own method, when he said,
"I am like the hail. Cover thyself lest it come down upon thee, and strike
thee. And remember that I said unto thee, Cover thy head with a helmet, that is
clothe thyself with virtue and no hail stone will touch thee."1176

In the time of his greatest
popularity, the throngs waited hours at the doors of the cathedral for the
preacher’s arrival and it has been estimated by Villari, that audiences of
10,000 or 12,000 hung on his discourses. Like fields of grain under the wind,
the feelings of his audiences were swayed by the preacher’s voice. Now they
burned with indignation: now they were softened to tears. "I was overcome
by weeping and could not go on."
So wrote the reporter while taking down a sermon, and Savonarola himself
felt the terrible strain of his efforts and often sank back into his seat
completely exhausted. His message was directed to the clergy, high and low, as
well as to the people and the flashes of his indignation often fell upon the
palace of Lorenzo. The clergy he arraigned for their greed of prebends and gold
and their devotion to outer ceremonies rather than to the inner life of the
soul. Florence he addressed in endearing terms as the object of his love.
"My Florence," he was wont to exclaim. Geneva was no more the city of
Calvin or Edinburgh of Knox than was Florence the city of Savonarola.
Portraying the insincerity of the clergy, he said: —

In these days, prelates and preachers
are chained to the earth by the love of earthly things. The care of souls is no
longer their concern. They are content with the receipt of revenue. The
preachers preach to please princes and to be praised by them. They have done
worse. They have not only destroyed the Church of God. They have built up a new
Church after their own pattern. Go to Rome and see! In the mansions of the great prelates there is no concern save
for poetry and the oratorical art. Go thither and see! Thou shalt find them all with the books of
the humanities in their hands and telling one another that they can guide mens’
souls by means of Virgil, Horace and Cicero ... The prelates of former days had
fewer gold mitres and chalices and what few they possessed were broken up and
given to relieve the needs of the poor. But our prelates, for the sake of
obtaining chalices, will rob the poor of their sole means of support. Dost thou
not know what I would tell thee! What
doest thou, O Lord! Arise, and come to
deliver thy Church from the hands of devils, from the hands of tyrants, from
the hands of iniquitous prelates.1177

Dizzy flights of fancy abounded
in Savonarola’s discourses and took the place of calm and logical exposition.
On the evening before he preached his last sermon in Advent, 1492, Savonarola
beheld in the middle of the sky a hand holding a sword with the inscription,
Behold the sword of the Lord will descend suddenly and quickly upon the earth—Ecce gladius Domini super terram
cito et velociter. Suddenly the sword was turned toward the earth, the sky was darkened,
swords, arrows and flames rained down. The heavens quaked with thunder and the
world became a prey to famine and death. The vision was ended by a command to
the preacher to make these things known. Again and again, in after years did he
refer to this prophetic vision.1178 Its memory was also preserved by a medal, representing on one side
Savonarola and on the other a sword in the heavens held by a hand and pointing
to a city beneath.

The inscription on the heavenly
sword well represents the style of Savonarola’s preaching. It was impulsive,
pictorial, eruptive, startling, not judicial and instructive. And yet it made a
profound impression on men of different classes. Pico della Mirandola the elder
has described its marvellous effect upon himself. On one occasion, when he
announced as his text Gen. 6:17, "Behold I will bring the flood of waters
upon the earth," Pico said he felt a cold shudder course through him, and
his hair, as it were, stand on end. One is reminded of some of the impressions
made by the sermons of Christmas Evans, the Welsh preacher, and the impression
made by Whitefield’s oratory upon Lord Chesterfield and Franklin. But the
imagery of the sermon, brilliant and weird as it was, is no sufficient
explanation of the Florentine preacher’s power. The preacher himself was
burning with religious passion. He felt deeply and he was a man of deep
devotion. He had the eye of the mystic and saw beneath the external and ritual
to the inner movements of spiritual power.

The biblical element was also a
conspicuous feature of his preaching. Defective as Savonarola’s exegesis was,
the biblical element was everywhere in control of his thought and descriptions.
His famous discourses were upon the ark, Exodus, and the prophets Haggai,
Ezekiel, Amos and Hosea, and John’s Revelation. He insisted upon the authority
of Scripture. "I preach the regeneration of the Church," he said,
"taking the Scriptures as my sole guide."1179

Another element which gave to
Savonarola’s sermons their virility and power was the prophetic element.
Savonarola was not merely the expounder of righteousness. He claimed to be a
prophet revealing things which, to use his own words, "are beyond the
scope of the knowledge which is natural to any creature." This element would have been a sign of
weakness, if it had not been associated with a great personality, bent on noble
ends. The severity of his warnings was often so fearful that the preacher
himself shrank back from delivering them. On one occasion, he spent the entire
night in vigils and prayer that he might be released from the duty of making
known a message, but in vain. The sermon, he then went forth to preach, he
called a terrific sermon.

Savonarola’s confidence in his
divine appointment to be the herald of special communications from above found
expression not only from the pulpit but was set forth more calmly in two works,
the Manual of Revelations, 1495, and a Dialogue concerning Truth and
Prophecy, 1497. The latter tract with a number of Savonarola’s sermons were
placed on the Index. In the former, the author declared that for a long time he
had by divine inspiration foretold future things but, bearing in mind the
Saviour’s words, "Give not that which is holy unto the dogs," he had
practised reserve in such utterances. He expressed his conception of the office
committed to him, when he said, "The Lord has put me here and has said to
me, ’I have placed thee as a watchman in the centre of Italy ... that thou mayest
hear my words and announce them,’ " Ezek. 3:17. If we are inclined to
regard Savonarola as having made a mistake in claiming prophetic foresight, we
easily condone the mistake on the ground of his impassioned fervor and the pure
motives by which he was animated. To his prophecies he applied Christ’s own
words, that no jot or tittle should fail till they were fulfilled.

None of his messages was more
famous than the one he received on his visit to paradise, March, 1495. Before
starting on his journey, a number of ladies offered to be his companions.
Philosophy and Rhetoric he declined. Accepting the company of Faith,
Simplicity, Prayer and Patience, he was met on his way by the devil in a monk’s
garb.1180 Satan
took occasion to present to him objections against the supernatural character
of his predictions. Savonarola ought to have stopped with preaching virtue and
denouncing vices and left prophecy alone. A prophet was always accredited by
miracles. True prophets were holy men and the devil asked Savonarola whether he
felt he had reached a high grade of saintliness. He then ventured to show that
Savonarola’s prophecies had not always been fulfilled. By this time they had
arrived at the gates of paradise where prudently Satan took his leave. The
walls of paradise—so Savonarola described them—were of diamonds and other
precious stones. Ten banners surmounted them inscribed with the prayers of
Florence. Hierarchies and principalities appeared on every side. With the help
of angels, the visitor mounted a ladder to the throne of the Virgin who gave
him a crown and a precious stone and then, with Jesus in her arms, supplicated
the Trinity for Savonarola and the Florentines. Her request was granted and the
Florentines promised an era of prosperity preceded by a period of sorrows. In
this new time, the city would be more powerful and rich than ever before.

The question arises whether
Savonarola was a genuine prophet or whether he was self-deluded, mistaking for
the heated imaginations of his own religious fervor, direct communications from
God.1181 Alexander
VI. made Savonarola’s "silly declaration of being a prophet" one of
the charges against him.1182 In his Manual
of Revelations, Savonarola advanced four considerations to prove that he
was a true prophet—his own subjective certainty, the fulfilment of his
predictions, their result in helping on the cause of moral reform in Florence
and their acceptance by good people in the city. His prophecies, he said, could
not have come from astrology for he rejected it, nor from a morbid imagination
for this was inconsistent with his extensive knowledge of the Scriptures, nor
from Satan for Satan hated his sermons and does not know future events.

For us, the only valid test is
historical fact. Were Savonarola’s prophecies fulfilled? The two prophecies, upon whose fulfilment
stress is laid, were the political revolution in Florence, which occurred, and
the coming of Charles VIII. from across the Alps. Savonarola saw in Charles a
Cyrus whose advent would release Florence from her political bondage and
introduce an era of civil freedom . He also predicted Charles’ subsequent
retreat. Commines, who visited Savonarola in the convent of St. Mark’s after
the trials which followed Charles’ advent in Italy had begun, went away
impressed with the friar’s piety and candor, and declared that he predicted with
certainty to him and to the king, "things which no one believed at the
time and which have all been fulfilled since."1183 On the other hand, such solemn prognostications failed of
fulfilment, as the extension of Florentine dominion even to the recovery of
Pisa, made May 28, 1495, and the speedy conversion of the Turks and Moors, made
May 3, 1495. The latter purported to be a revelation from the Virgin on his
visit to paradise. Where a certain number of solemn, prophetic announcements
remained unfulfilled, it is fair to suspect that the remainder were merely the
predictions of a shrewd observer watching the progress of events. Many people
trusted the friar as a prophet but, as conditions became more and more
involved, they demanded with increasing insistence that he should substantiate
his prophetic claim by a miracle. Even the predictions which came true in part,
such as the coming of Charles VIII. across the Alps, received no fulfilment in
the way of a permanent improvement of conditions, such as Savonarola expected.
The statement of Prof. Bonet-Maury expresses the case well. Savonarola’s
prophetic gift, so-called, was nothing more than political and religious
intuition.1184 Some of
his predictions were not in the line of what Christian prophecies might be
expected to be, such as the rehumiliation of Pisa. The Florentines felt
flattered by the high honor which the prophet paid to their city, and his
predictions of her earthly dominion as well as heavenly glory. In his Manual
of Revelations he exclaims, "Whereas Florence is placed in the midst
of Italy, like the heart in the midst of the body, God has chosen to select
her, that she may be the centre from which this prophetic announcement should
be spread abroad throughout all Italy."

No scene in Savonarola’s career
excels in moral grandeur and dramatic interest his appearance at the death-bed
of Lorenzo the Magnificent, in 1492. History has few such scenes to offer. When
it became apparent to the brilliant ruler of the Florentine state that his days
were numbered, he felt unwilling to face the mysteries of death and the future
without the absolution priestly prerogative pretends to be competent to confer.
Savonarola and Lorenzo loved Florence with an equal love, though the one sought
its glory through a career of righteousness and the other through a career of
worldly dominion and glittering culture. The two leaders found no terms of
agreement. Lorenzo had sought to win the preacher by personal attention and
blandishments. He attended mass at St. Mark’s. Savonarola held himself back as
from an elegant worldling and the enemy of the liberties of Florence. "You
see," said Lorenzo, "a stranger has come into my house, yet he will
not stoop to pay me a visit."
"He does not ask for me; let him go or stay at his pleasure,"
replied the friar to those who told him that Lorenzo was in the convent garden.

Five influential citizens of
Florence called and suggested to the friar that he modify his public
utterances. Recognizing that they had come at Lorenzo’s instance, he bade them
tell the prince to do penance for his sins, for the Lord is no respecter of
persons and spares not the mighty of the earth. Lorenzo called upon Fra Mariano
to publicly take Savonarola to task. This he did from the pulpit on Ascension
Day, 1491. Lorenzo himself was present, but the preacher’s charges overshot the
mark, and Savonarola was more popular than ever. The prior of St. Mark’s
exclaimed, "Although I am a stranger in the city, and Lorenzo the first
man in the state, yet shall I stay here and it is he who will go hence."

When the hour of death
approached, Lorenzo was honest with himself. In vain did the physician, Lazzaro
of Pavia, resort to the last medical measure, a potion of distilled gems.
Farewell was said to Pico della Mirandola and other literary friends, and
Lorenzo gave his final counsels to his son, Piero. The solemn rites of
absolution and extreme unction were all that remained for man to receive from
man. Lorenzo’s confessor was within reach but the prince looked to St. Mark’s.
"I know of no honest friar save this one," he exclaimed. And so
Savonarola was summoned to the bedside in the villa Careggi, two miles from the
city. The dying man wanted to make confession of three misdeeds: the sack of
Volterra, the robbery of Monte delle Fanciulle and the merciless reprisals
after the Pazzi conspiracy. The spiritual messenger then proceeded to present
three conditions on which his absolution depended. The first was a strong faith
in God’s mercy. The dying man gave assent. The second was that he restore his
ill-gotten wealth, or charge his sons to do it. To this assent was also given.
The third demand required that he give back to Florence her liberties. To this
Lorenzo gave no response and turned his face to the wall. The priest withdrew
and, in a few hours, April 8, 1492, the ruler of Florence passed into the
presence of the omnipotent Judge who judgeth not according to the appearance
but according to the heart and whose mercy is everlasting.

The surmisal has been made that,
if Savonarola had been less rigid, he might have exercised an incalculable
influence for good upon the dying prince who was still susceptible of religious
impressions.1185 But who
can with probability conjecture the secrets of the divine purpose in such
cases? Perhaps, Savonarola’s relentless
demands awakened in Lorenzo a serious impression showing itself in a cry to God
for absolution, while the extreme unction of the priest might have lulled the
dying man’s conscience to sleep with a false sense of security. At any rate,
the influence of the friar of St. Mark’s with the people increased.

During the years, beginning with
1494, Savonarola’s ascendancy was at its height and so cold a witness as
Guicciardini reports his influence as extraordinary. These years included the
invasion of Charles VIII., the banishment of the Medici from Florence and the
establishment of a theocratic government in the city.

"He will come across the
Alps against Italy like Cyrus," Savonarola had prophesied of the French
king, Charles VIII. And, when the French army was approaching the confines of
Florence, he exclaimed, "Behold, the sword has come upon you. The
prophecies are fulfilled, the scourge begun!
Behold these hosts are led of the Lord!
O Florence, the time of singing and dancing is at an end. Now is the
time to shed floods of tears for thy sins."

Florence listened eagerly. Piero
de’ Medici went to the French camp and yielded to the king’s demand for 200,000
florins, and the cession of Pisa, Leghorn and Sarzana. But Savonarola thundered
and pled from the pulpit against the Medicean house. The city decreed its
banishment and sent commissioners to Charles, with Savonarola among them. In
his address, which is preserved, the friar reminded his Majesty that he was an
instrument sent by the Lord to relieve Italy of its woes and to reform the
Church. Charles entered Florence but, moved by Savonarola’s intercession,
reduced the tribute to 120,000 florins and restrained the depredations of the
French soldiery. The king also seems to have listened to the friar’s stern
words when he said to him, "Hearken unto the voice of God’s servant and
pursue thy journey onward without delay."

When Charles, after sacking Rome and occupying Naples,
returned to Northern Italy, Savonarola wrote him five letters threatening that,
if he did not do for Florence the things about which he had spoken to him,
God’s wrath would be poured out upon his head. These things were the recognition
of the liberties of Florence and the return of Pisa to her dominion. In his
letter of May 25, 1495, bidding Charles favor the city of Florence, he
asserted, "God has chosen this city and determined to magnify her and
raise her up and, whoso toucheth her, toucheth the apple of His eye." Certainly, from the standpoint of the
welfare of Italy, the French invasion was not of Providential origin. Although
the banners of his army were inscribed with the words Voluntas Dei — the Will of God—and Missus Dei — the legate of God—Charles was
bent on territorial aggrandizement and not on breaking the bonds of civic
despotism.

The time had now come to realize
in Florence Savonarola’s ideal of government, a theocracy with Christ at its
head. The expulsion of the Medici made possible a reorganization of the state
and the new constitution, largely a matter of Savonarola’s creation, involved
him inextricably in civic policies and the war of civic factions. However, it
should not be forgotten that his municipal constitution secured the
commendation of Guicciardini and other Italian political writers. It was a
proof of the friar’s remarkable influence that, at his earnest advice, a law
was passed which prevented retaliatory measures against the followers of the
Medici. Landucci wrote in his diary that, but for Savonarola, the streets would
have been bathed in blood. In his great sermons on Haggai, during the Advent
season of 1494, and on the Psalms in 1495, Savonarola definitely embarked as a
pilot on the political sea. "The Lord has driven my bark into the open
ocean," he exclaimed from the pulpit. Remonstrating with God for imposing
this duty upon him, he declared, ’I will preach, if so I must, but why need I
meddle with the government of Florence.’
And the Lord said, ’If thou wouldst make Florence a holy city, thou must
establish her on firm foundations and give her a government which cherishes
righteousness.’ Thus the preacher was
committed. He pronounced from the pulpit in favor of virtue as the foundation
of a sound government and democracy as its form. "Among northern
nations," he affirmed, where there is great strength and little intellect,
and among southern nations where there is great intellect and little strength,
the rule of a single despot may sometimes be the best of governments. But in
Italy and, above all in Florence, where both strength and intellect
abound,—where men have keen wits and restless spirits,—the government of the
one can only result in tyranny."

In the scheme, which he
proposed, he took for his model the great council of Venice, leaving out its
head, the doge, who was elected for life. The great council of Florence was to
consist of, at least, 1500 men, who had reached the age of 29, paid their taxes
and belonged to the class called beneficiati, that is, those who held a civil office themselves or
whose father, grandfather, or great-grandfather had held a civil office. A
select council of 80 was to be chosen by it, its members to be at least forty
years of age. In criminal cases, an appeal from a decision of the signory was
allowed to the great council, which was to meet once a week and to be a voting
rather than a deliberative body.

The place of the supreme doge or
ruler, Savonarola gave to God himself. "God alone," he exclaimed from
the pulpit, "God alone will be thy king, O Florence, as He was king of
Israel under the old Covenant."
"Thy new head shall be Jesus Christ,"—this was the ringing cry
with which he closed his sermons on Haggai. Savonarola’s recent biographer,
Villari, emphasizes "the masterly prudence and wisdom shown by him in all
the fundamental laws he proposed for the new state." He had no seat in the council and yet he was
the soul of the entire people.1186

In the last chapter of his
career Savonarola was pitted against Alexander VI. as his contestant. The
conflict began with the demand made by the pope July 25, 1495, that Savonarola
proceed to Rome and answer charges. Then followed papal inhibitions of his
preaching and the decree of excommunication, and the conflict closed with the
appointment of a papal commission which condemned Savonarola to death as a
heretic.

Alexander’s order, summoning the
friar to Rome, was based on his announcement that his predictions of future
events came by divine revelation.1187 At the same time, the pope expressed his great joy over the report
that of all the workers in the Lord’s vineyard, Savonarola was the most
zealous, and he promised to welcome him to the eternal city with love and
fraternal affection. Savonarola declined the pontiff’s summons on the ground of
ill-health and the dangers that would beset him on the way to Rome. His old
rival in the pulpit, Fra Mariano de Gennazzano, and other enemies were in Rome
intriguing against him, and the Medici were fast winning the pope’s favor.

Alexander’s first letter
inhibiting him from preaching, Sept. 9, 1495, condemned Savonarola’s insane
folly in mixing up with Italian political affairs and his announcement that he
was a special messenger sent from God. In his reply Savonarola answered the
charges and, at the invitation of the signory, continued to preach. In his
third brief, Oct. 16, 1495, the pontiff forbade him to preach openly or in
private. Pastor remarks, "It was as clear as the sun that Savonarola was
guilty of rank disobedience to the papal authority."1188

For five months, the friar held
himself aloof in his convent but, Feb. 17, 1496, at the call of the signory to
preach the Lenten sermons, he again ascended the pulpit. He took the bold
position that the pope might err. "The pope," he said, "may
command me to do something that contravenes the law of Christian love or the
Gospel. But, if he did so command, I would say to him, thou art no shepherd.
Not the Roman Church, but thou errest." From that time on, he lifted his
voice against the corruptions of the papal city as he had not done before.
Preaching on Amos 4:1, Feb. 28, 1496, he exclaimed, "Who are the fat kine
of Bashan on the mountains of Samaria?
I say they are the courtesans of Italy and Rome. Or, are there
none? A thousand are too few for Rome,
10,000, 12,000, 14,000 are too few for Rome. Prepare thyself, O Rome, for great
will be thy punishments."1189

Finding threats would not stop
Savonarola’s mouth, Alexander resorted to bribery, an art in which he was well
skilled. Through a Dominican sent to Florence, he offered to the friar of St.
Mark’s the red hat. But Alexander had mistaken his man and, in a sermon
delivered August, 1496, Savonarola declared that neither mitres nor a
cardinal’s hat would he have, but only the gift God confers on His
saints—death, a crimson hat, a hat reddened with blood. Lucas, strangely
enough, ascribes the offer of the red hat, not to vicious shrewdness but to the
alleged good purpose of Alexander to show his appreciation of, an earnest but
misguided man."

The carnival season of 1496 and
the seasons of the next two years gave remarkable proofs of the hold Savonarola
had on the popular mind. The carnival, which had been the scene of wild
revelries, was turned into a semi-religious festival. The boys had been
accustomed to carry their merriment to rude excesses, forcing their demands for
money upon older persons, dancing around bonfires at night and pelting people
and houses promiscuously with stones. For this "festival of the
stones," which the signory had been unable to abolish Savonarola and his
co-helpers substituted a religious celebration. It was called the reform of the
boys. Savonarola had established boys’ brigades in different wards of the city
and arranged tiers of seats for them against the walls of the cathedral. These
"boys of Fra Girolamo," as Landucci calls them, marched up and down
the streets singing hymns which Savonarola and Benivieni composed and taking
their places at stands, erected for the purpose, received collections for the
poor.

On the last day of the carnival
of 1497, occurred the burning of the vanities, as it was called. The young men,
who had been stirred to enthusiasm by Savonarola’s sermons, went through the
city, knocking from door to door and asking the people to give up their
trinkets, obscene books such as Ovid and Boccaccio, dice, games of chance,
harps, mirrors, masks, cosmetics and portraits of beautiful women, and other
objects of luxury. These were piled up in the public square in a pyramid, 60
feet high and 240 feet in circumference at the base. The morning of that day,
throngs listened to the mass said by Savonarola. The young men went in
procession through the streets and reaching the pile of vanities, they with
others joined hands and danced around the pile and then set fire to it amid the
singing of religious songs. The sound of bells and trumpets added to the effect
of the strange spectacle. Men thought of the books and philters, burnt at
Ephesus under the spell of Paul’s preaching. The scene was repeated the last
year of Savonarola’s life,1498.

Savonarola has been charged with
having no sympathy with the Renaissance and the charge it is not easy to set
aside. As Burckhardt, the historian of that movement, says, he remained a monastic.
In one writing, he sets forth the dangers of literature. Plato and Aristotle
are in hell. And this was the judgment expressed in the city of the Platonic
Academy! Virgil and Cicero he
tolerated, but Catullus, Ovid and Terence he condemned to banishment.1190

At one time, under the spell of
the prior’s preaching, all Florence seemed to be going to religion. Wives left
their husbands and betook themselves to convents. Others married, taking the
vow of nuptial abstinence and Savonarola even dreamed that the city might reach
so perfect a condition that all marrying would cease. People took the communion
daily and young men attended mass and received the eucharistic emblem. Fra
Bartolomeo threw his studies of naked figures into the fire and for a time
continued to think it sinful to use the hands in painting which ought to be
folded continually in prayer. It was impossible that such a tension should
continue. There was enthusiasm but not regeneration. A reaction was sure to
come and the wonder is that Savonarola retained so much of the popular
confidence, almost to the end of his life.

Alexander would have none of the
Florentine reforms and was determined to silence Savonarola at any cost. Within
the city, the air was full of rumors of plots to restore the Medici and some of
the conspirators were executed. Enemies of the republic avowed their purpose to
kill Savonarola and circulated sheets and poems ridiculing and threatening him.
Insulting placards were posted up against the walls of his convent and, on one
occasion, the pulpit of the cathedral was defiled with ordure and draped in an
ass’ skin, while spikes were driven into the place where the preacher was
accustomed to strike his hand. Landucci speaks of it as a "great
scandal." Assassins even gathered
in the cathedral and were only cowed by guards posted by the signory. The friar
of St. Mark’s seemed not to be appalled. It was ominous, however, that the
signory became divided in his support.

If possible, Savonarola became
more intense in his arraignment of the evils of the Church. He exclaimed:
"O prostrate Church, thou hast displayed thy foulness to the whole earth.
Thou hast multiplied thy fornications in Italy, in France, in Spain and all
other regions. Thou hast desecrated the sacraments with simony. Of old, priests
called their bastards nephews, now they call them outright sons." Alexander could not mistake the reference
nor tolerate such declamations. The integrity of the supreme seat of
Christendom was at stake. A prophetic function superior to the papacy Eugenius
III. might recognize, when it was administered in the admonitions of a St.
Bernard, but the Florentine prophet had engaged in denunciation even to
personal invective. The prophet was losing his balance. On May 12,1497, for
"his failure to obey our Apostolic admonitions and commands" and as
"one suspected of heresy" Alexander declared him excommunicate. All
were forbidden to listen to the condemned man or have converse with him.1191

In a letter addressed a month
later "to all Christians, the elect of God," Savonarola again
affirmed his readiness to yield to the Church’s authority, but denied that he
was bound to submit to the commands of his superiors when these were in
conflict with charity and God’s law. "Henceforth," exclaimed the
Puritan contemporary, Landucci, "we were deprived of the Word of
God." The signory wrote to
Alexander in support of Savonarola, affirming his purity of character and
soundness of doctrine, and friends, like Pico della Mirandola the younger,
issued defences of his conduct. The elder Pico della Mirandola and Politian,
both of whom had died a year or two before, showed their reverence for
Savonarola by assuming the Dominican garb on their death-beds.

At this time, Savonarola sent
forth his Triumph of the Cross, in which were set forth the verity and
reasonableness of the Catholic faith.1192 After proving from pure reason God’s existence and the soul’s
immortality, the work proceeds to expound the Trinity, which is above man’s
reason, and articles of the Apostles’ Creed, and to set forth the superior
excellency of the lives of Christians, on which much stress is laid. It closes
with a confutation of Mohammedanism and other false forms of religion.

Savonarola kept silence in the
pulpit and refrained from the celebration of the sacrament until Christmas day
of 1497, when he celebrated the mass at St. Mark’s three times. On the 11th of
February, he stood again in the pulpit of the duomo. To a vast concourse he
represented the priest as merely an instrument of the Almighty and, when God
withdraws His presence, prelate and pope are but as "a broken iron
tool." "And, if a prelate
commands what is contrary to godly living and charity, he is not only not to be
obeyed but deserves to be anathema."
On another occasion, he said that not only may the pope be led into
error by false reports but also by his own badness, as was the case with
Boniface VIII. who was a wicked pope, beginning his pontificate like a fox and
ending it like a dog.1193 Many,
through reverence for the Church, kept away from Savonarola’s preaching from
this time on. Among these was the faithful Landucci, who says, "whether
justly or unjustly, I was among those who did not go. I believed in him, but
did not wish to incur risk by going to hear him, for he was under sentence of
excommunication." Savonarola’s
enemies had made the words of Gregory the Great their war-cry, Sententia pastoris sive justa
sive unjusta timenda est.—"The sentence of the shepherd is to be respected, whether it be
just or unjust."1194 His
denunciations of the corruption prevailing in the Church became more bold. The
tonsure, he cried,

is the seat of all iniquity. It
begins in Rome where the clergy make mock of Christ and the saints; yea, are
worse than Turks and worse than Moors. They traffic in the sacraments. They
sell benefices to the highest bidder. Have not the priests in Rome courtesans
and grooms and horses and dogs? Have
they not palaces full of tapestries and silks, of perfumes and lackeys? Seemeth it, that this is the Church of God?

Every Roman priest, he said, had
his concubine. No longer do they speak of nephews but of their sons and
daughters. Savonarola even sought to prove from the pulpit that the papal brief
of excommunication proceeded from the devil, inasmuch as it was hostile to
godly living.

It was becoming evident that the
preacher was fighting a losing battle. His assaults against the morals of the
clergy and the Vatican stirred up the powers in the Church against him; his
political attitude, factions in Florence. His assertions, dealing more and more
in exaggerations, were developing an expectant and at the same time a critical
state of mind in the people which no religious teacher could permanently meet
except through the immediate and startling intervention of God. He called
heaven to witness that he was "ready to die for His God" and invited
God to send him to the fires of hell, if his motives were not pure and his work
inspired. On another occasion, he invoked the Lord to strike him dead on the
spot, if he was not sincere. Landucci reports some of these wild protestations
which he heard with his own ears.

One weapon still remained to the
pope to bring Savonarola to terms,—the interdict. This he threatened to
fulminate over Florence, unless the signory sent this "son of the evil
one" to Rome or cast him into prison. In case the first course was pursued,
Alexander promised to treat Savonarola as a father would treat a son, provided
he repented, for he "desired not the death of a sinner but that he might
turn from his way and live."1195 He urged the signory not to allow Savonarola to be as the fly in
the milk, disturbing its relations with Rome or "to tolerate that
pernicious worm fostered by their warmth."

Through epistolary
communications and legates, the signory continued its attempts to remove
Alexander’s objections and protect Savonarola. But, while all the members
continued to express confidence in the friar’s purity of motive, the majority
came to take the position that it was more expedient to silence the preacher
than to incur the pope’s ban. At the public meeting, called by the signory
March 9,1498, to decide the course of action to be taken, the considerations
pressed were those of expediency. The pope, as the vicar of Christ, has his
authority directly from God and ought to be obeyed. A second consideration was
the financial straits of the municipality. A tenth was needed and this could
only be ordered through the pope. Some proposed to leave the decision of the
matter to Savonarola himself. He was the best man the world had seen for 200
years. Others boldly announced that Alexander’s letters were issued through the
machinations of enemies of Florence and the censures they contained, being
unjust, were not to be heeded.1196 On March 17,1498, the signory’s decision was communicated to
Savonarola that he should thenceforth refrain from preaching and the next day
he preached his last sermon.

In his last sermon, Savonarola
acknowledged it as his duty to obey the mandate. A measure had been worked out
in his mind which was the last open to a churchman. Already had he hinted from
the pulpit at the convention of a general council as a last resort. The letters
are still extant which he intended to send to the kings of Spain, England,
France, Germany and Hungary, calling upon them to summon a council. In them, he
solemnly declared that Alexander was no pope. For, aside from purchasing his
office and from his daily sale of benefices, his manifest vices proved him to
be no Christian. The letters seem never to have been received. Individuals,
however, despatched preliminary communications to friends at the different
courts to prepare the way for their appeal.1197 One, addressed to Charles VIII., was intercepted at Milan and sent
to the pope. Alexander now had documentary proof of the Florentine’s rebellion
against papal authority. But suddenly a wholly unexpected turn was given to the
course of events.

Florence was startled by the
rumor that resort was to be had to ordeal by fire to decide the genuineness of
Savonarola’s claims.1198 The
challenge came from a Franciscan, Francesco da Puglia, in a sermon at S. Croce
in which he arraigned the Dominican friar as a heretic and false prophet. In
case Savonarola was not burnt, it would be a clear sign that Florence was to
follow him. The challenge was accepted by Fra Domenico da Pescia, a monk of St.
Mark’s and close friend of Savonarola’s, a man of acknowledged purity of life.
He took his friend’s place, holding that Savonarola should be reserved for
higher things. Francesco da Puglia then withdrew and a Franciscan monk, Julian
Rondinelli, reluctantly took his place. Savonarola himself disapproved the
ordeal. It was an appeal to the miraculous. He had never performed a miracle
nor felt the importance of one. His cause, he asserted, approved itself by the
fruits of righteousness. But to the people, as the author of Romola has said,
"the fiery trial seemed a short and easy argument" and Savonarola
could not resist the popular feeling without forfeiting his popularity. The
history of Florence could show more than one case of saintly men whose
profession had been tested by fire. So it was, during the investiture controversy,
with St. John Gualberti, in Settimo close by, and with the monk Peter in 1068,
and so it was, a half century later, with another Peter who cleared himself of
the charge of contemning the cross by walking unhurt over nine glowing
ploughshares.1199

The ordeal was authorized by the
signory and set for April 7. It was decided that, in case Fra Domenico
perished, Savonarola should go into exile within three hours. The two parties,
Domenico and Rondinelli, filed their statements with the signory. The
Dominican’s included the following points. The Church stands in need of
renovation. It will be chastened. Florence will be chastened. These
chastisements will happen in our day. The sentence of excommunication against
Savonarola is invalid. No one sins in ignoring it.1200

The ordeal aroused the
enthusiasm of Savonarola’s friends. When he announced it in a sermon, many
women exclaimed, "I, too, I, too."
Other monks of St. Mark’s and hundreds of young men announced their
readiness to pass through the flames out of regard for their spiritual guide.

Alexander VI. waited with
intense interest for the last bulletins from Florence. His exact state of mind
it is difficult to determine. He wrote disapproving of the ordeal and yet he
could not but feel that it afforded an easy way of getting rid of the enemy to
his authority. After the ordeal was over, he praised Francesco and the
Franciscans in extravagant terms and declared the Franciscans could not have
done anything more agreeable to him.1201

The coming trial was looked for
with the most intense interest. There was scarcely any other topic of
conversation in Florence or in Rome. Great preparations were made. Two pyres of
thorns and other wood were built on the public square about 60 feet in length,
3 feet wide at the base and 3 or 4 feet high,1202the wood soaked with pitch and
oil. The distance between the pyres was two feet, just wide enough for a man to
pass through. All entrances to the square were closed by a company of 300 men
under Marcuccio Salviatis and two other companies of 500 each, stationed at
different points. The people began to arrive the night before. The windows and
roofs of the adjoining houses were crowded with the eager spectators.

The solemnity was set for eleven
o’clock. The Dominicans made a solemn impression as they marched to the
appointed place. Fra Domenico, in the van, was clothed in a fiery red velvet
cope. Savonarola, clad in white and carrying a monstrance with the host,
brought up the rear of the body of monks and these were followed by a great
multitude of men, women and children, holding lighted tapers. When the hour
arrived for the procession to start, Savonarola was preaching. He had again
told the people that his work required no miracle and that he had ever sought
to justify himself by the signs of righteousness and declared that, as on Mt.
Carmel, miraculous intervention could only be expected in answer to prayer and
humility.

Later mediaeval history has few
spectacles to offer to the eye and the imagination equal in interest to the
spectacle offered that day. There, stood the greatest preacher of his time and
the most exalted moral figure since the days of John Huss and Gerson. And
there, the ancient method of testing innocency was once more to be tried, a
novel spectacle, indeed, to that cultured generation of Florentines. The
glorious pageants of Medicean times had afforded no entertainment more
attractive.

The crowds were waiting. The
hour was past. There was a mysterious moving of monks in and out of the
signory-palace. The whole story of what occurred was later told by Savonarola
himself as well as by other eyewitnesses. The Franciscans refused to allow Fra
Domenico to enter the burning pathway wearing his red cope or any of the other
garments he had on, on the ground that they might be bewitched. So he was
undressed to his skin and put on another suit. On the same ground, they also
insisted that he keep at a distance from Savonarola. The impatience of the
crowds increased. The Franciscans again passed into the signory-hall and had a
long conference. They had discerned a wooden crucifix in Domenico’s hands and
insisted upon its being put away for fear it might also have been bewitched.
Savonarola substituted the host but the Franciscans insisted that the host
should not be carried through the flames. The signory was appealed to but Savonarola
refused to yield, declaring that the accidents might be burnt like a husk but
that the essence of the sacred wafer would remain unconsumed. Suddenly a storm
came up and rain fell but it as suddenly stopped. The delay continued. The
crowds were growing unruly and threatening. Nightfall was at hand. The signory
called the ordeal off.

Savonarola’s power was gone. The
spell of his name had vanished. The spectacle was felt to be a farce. The
popular menace grew more and more threatening and a guard scarcely prevented
violence to Savonarola’s person, as the procession moved back to St. Mark’s.

There is much in favor of the
view that on that day Savonarola’s political enemies, the Arrabbiati, were in
collusion with the Franciscans and that the delay on the square, occasioned by
interposing objections, was a trick to postpone the ordeal altogether.1203 It was said daggers were ready to put Savonarola out of the way.
The populace, however, did not stop to consider such questions. Savonarola had
not stood the test. And, it reasoned, if he was sincere and confident of his
cause, why did he not enter the flaming pathway himself and brave its fiery
perils. If he had not gone through unharmed, he at any rate, in dying, would
have shown his moral heroism. It was Luther’s readiness to stand the test at
Worms which brought him the confidence of the people. Had he shrunk in 1521 in
the presence of Charles V., he would have lost the popular regard as Savonarola
did in 1498 on the piazza of Florence. The judgment of modern times agrees with
the popular judgment of the Florentines. Savonarola showed himself wanting in
the qualities of the hero. Better for him to have died, than to have exposed
himself to the charge of cowardice.

Florence felt mad anger at
having been imposed upon. The next day St. Mark’s was stormed by the mob. The
signory voted Savonarola’s immediate banishment. Landucci, who wept and
continued to pray for him, says "that hell seemed to have opened its
doors." Savonarola made an
address, bidding farewell to his friends. Resistance of the mob was in vain.
The convent was broken into and pillaged. Fra Domenico and the prior were bound
and taken before the galfonier amidst insults and confined in separate
apartments. A day or two later Fra Silvestro, whose visions had favored the
ordeal, was also seized. "As for saying a word in Savonarola’s
favor," wrote Landucci, "it was impossible. One would have been
killed."

The pope, on receiving the
official news of the occurrences in Florence, sent word congratulating the
signory, gave the city plenary absolution and granted it the coveted tithes for
three years. He also demanded that Savonarola be sent to Rome for trial, at the
same time, however, authorizing the city to proceed to try the three friars,
not neglecting, if necessary, the use of torture.1204 A commission was appointed to examine the prisoners. Torture was
resorted to. Savonarola was bound to a rope drawn through a pulley and, with
his hands behind his back, was lifted from the floor and then by a sudden jerk
allowed to fall. On a single day, he was subjected to 14 turnings of the rope.
There were two separate trials conducted by the municipality, April 17 and
April 21–23. In the delirious condition, to which his pains reduced him, the
unfortunate man made confessions which, later in his sane moments, he recalled
as untrue.1205 He even
denied that he was a prophet. The impression which this denial made upon such
ardent admirers as Landucci, the apothecary, was distressing. Writing April
19,1498, he says:—

I was present at the reading of
the proceedings against Savonarola, whom we all held to be a prophet. But he
said he is no prophet and that his prophecies were not from God. When I heard
that, I was seized with wonder and amazement. A deep pain took hold of my soul,
when I saw such a splendid edifice fall to the ground, because it was built
upon the sorry foundation of a falsehood. I looked for Florence to become a new
Jerusalem whose laws and example of a good life—buona vita — would go out for the renovation
of the Church, the conversion of infidels and the comfort of the good and I
felt the contrary and took for medicine the words, "in thy will, O Lord,
are all things placed"—in voluntate tua, Domine, omnia sunt posita. Diary, p. 173.

Alexander despatched a
commission of his own to conduct the trial anew, Turriano, the Venetian general
of the Dominicans and Francesco Romolino, the bishop of Ilerda, afterwards
cardinal. Letters from Rome stated that the commission had instructions
"to put Savonarola to death, even if he were another John the
Baptist." Alexander was quite
equal to such a statement. Soon after his arrival in Florence, Romolino
announced that a bonfire was impending and that he carried the sentence with
him ready, prepared in advance.

Fra Domenico bore himself most
admirably and persisted in speaking naught but praise of his friend and
ecclesiastical superior. Fra Silvestro, yielding to the agonies of the rack,
charged his master with all sorts of guilt. Other monks of St. Mark’s wrote to
Alexander, making charges against their prior as an impostor. So it often is
with those who praise in times of prosperity. To save themselves, they deny and
calumniate their benefactors. They received their reward, the papal absolution.

The exact charges, upon which
Savonarola was condemned to death, are matter of some uncertainty and also
matter of indifference, for they were partly trumped up for the occasion.
Though no offender against the law of God, he had given offence enough to man.
He was accused by the papal commissioners with being a heretic and schismatic.
He was no heretic. The most that can be said is, that he was a rebel against
the pope’s authority and went in the face of Pius II.’s bull Execrabilis, when he decided to appeal to a
council.1206

The intervals between his
torture, Savonarola spent in composing his Meditations upon the two
penitential Psalms, the 32d and the 51st. Here we see the gloss of his warm
religious nature. The great preacher approaches the throne of grace as a needy
sinner and begs that he who asks for bread may not be turned away with a stone.
He appeals to the cases of Zaccheus, Mary Magdalene, the woman of Canaan, Peter
and the prodigal son. Deliver me, he cries, "as Thou hast delivered
countless sinners from the grasp of death and the gates of hell and my tongue
shall sing aloud of thy righteousness."
Luther, who published the expositions with a notable preface,1523,
declared them "a piece of evangelical teaching and Christian piety. For,
in them Savonarola is seen entering in not as a Dominican monk, trusting in his
vows, the rules of his order, his cowl and masses and good works but clad in
the breastplate of righteousness and armed with the shield of faith and the
helmet of salvation, not as a member of the Order of Preachers but as an
everyday Christian."1207

At their own request the three
prisoners, after a separation of six weeks, were permitted to meet face to face
the night before the appointed execution. The meeting occurred in the hall of
the signory. When Savonarola returned to his cell, he fell asleep on the lap of
Niccolini of the fraternity of the Battuti, a fraternity whose office it was to
minister to prisoners. Niccolini reported that the sleep was as quiet as the
sleep of a child. On awaking, the condemned man passed the remaining hours of
the night in devotions. The next morning, the friends met again and partook
together of the sacrament.

The sentence was death by
hanging, after which the bodies were to be burnt that "the soul might be
completely separated from the body."
The execution took place on the public square where, two months before,
the crowds had gathered to witness the ordeal by fire. Savonarola and his
friends were led forth stripped of their robes, barefooted and with hands
bound. Absolution was pronounced by the bishop of Verona under appointment from
the pope. In pronouncing Savonarola’s deposition, the prelate said, "I
separate thee from the Church militant and the Church triumphant"—separo te ab ecclesia militante
et triumphante.
"Not from the Church triumphant," replied Savonarola, "that is
not thine to do"—militante, non triumphante: hoc enim tuum non est. In silence he witnessed the
deaths of Fra Domenico and Fra Silvestro, whose last words were "Jesus,
Jesus," and then ascended the platform of execution. There were still left
bystanders to fling insults. The bodies were burnt and, that no particle might
be left to be used as a relic, the ashes were thrown into the Arno.

Savonarola had been pronounced
by Alexander’s commission "that iniquitous monster—omnipedium nequissimum — call him man or friar we
cannot, a mass of the most abominable wickedness." The pious Landucci, in thinking of his
death, recalled the crucifixion and, at the scene of the execution, again
lamented the disappointment of his hopes for the renovation of the Church and
the conversion of the infidel—la novazione della chiesa e la
conversione degli infedeli.

Savonarola was one of the most
noteworthy figures Italy has produced. The modern Christian world, Catholic and
Protestant, joins him in close fellowship with the flaming religious luminaries
of all countries and all centuries. He was a preacher of righteousness and a
patriot. Among the religious personalities of Italy, he occupies a position of
grandeur by himself, separate from her imposing popes, like Gregory VII. and
Innocent III.; from Dante, Italy’s poet and the world’s; from St. Francis
d’Assisi and from Thomas Aquinas. Italy had other preachers,—Anthony of Padua,
Bernardino of Siena,—but their messages were local and ecclesiastical. With
Arnold of Brescia, Savonarola had something in common. Both had a stirring
message of reform. Both mixed up political ideals with their spiritual activity
and both died by judicial sanction of the papal see.

Savonarola’s intellectual gifts
and attainments were not extraordinary. He was great by reason of moral
conviction, his eloquence, his disinterested love of his country, his
whole-souled devotion to the cause of righteousness. As an administrator, he
failed. He had none of the sagacity or tact of the statesman and it was his
misfortune to have undertaken to create a new government, a task for which he
was the least qualified of all men.1208 He was a preacher of righteousness and has a place in the
"goodly fellowship of the prophets."
He belonged to the order of Ezekiel and Isaiah, Nathan and John the
Baptist,—the company in which the Protestant world also places John Knox.

Savonarola was a true Catholic.
He did not deny a single dogma of the mediaeval Church. But he was more deeply
rooted in the fundamental teachings of Christ than in ecclesiastical formulas.
In the deliverance of his message, he rose above rituals and usages. He
demanded regeneration of heart. His revolt against the authority of the pope,
in appealing to a council, is a serious stumbling-block to Catholics who are
inclined to a favorable judgment of the Friar of St. Mark’s. Julius II.’s bull Cum tanto divino,1505, pronounced every election
to the papacy secured by simony invalid. If it was meant to be retroactive,
then Alexander was not a true pope.1209

The favorable judgments of
contemporaries were numerous. Guicciardini called him the saviour of his
country—salvatore di patria — and said that "Never was there so much
goodness and religion in Florence as in his day and, after his death, it was
seen that every good thing that had been done was done at his suggestion and by
his advocacy." Machiavelli thus
expressed himself: "The people of Florence seemed to be neither illiterate
nor rude, yet they were persuaded that God spake through Savonarola. I will not
decide, whether it was so or not, for it is due to speak of so great a man with
reverence."

The day after Savonarola’s
death, women were seen praying at the spot where he suffered and for years
flowers were strewn there. Pico della Mirandola closed his biography with an
elaborate comparison between Savonarola and Christ. Both were sent from God.
Both suffered in the cause of righteousness between two others. At the command
of Julius II., Raphael,12 years after Savonarola’s death, placed the preacher
among the saints in his Disputa. Philip Neri and Catherine de Ricci 1210revered him, and Benedict XIV.
seems to have regarded him worthy of canonization.1211

Within the Dominican order, the
feeling toward its greatest preacher has undergone a great change. Respect for
the papal decision led it, for a hundred years after Savonarola’s death, to
make official effort to retire his name to oblivion. The Dominican general,
Sisto Fabri of Lucca, in 1585, issued an order forbidding every Dominican monk
and nun mentioning his name and commanded them to give up any article to their
superiors which kept warm admiration for him or aroused it. In the latter half
of the 19th century, as the 400th anniversary of his execution approached,
Catholics, and especially Dominicans, in all parts of the world defended his
memory and efforts were made to prepare the way for his canonization. In the
attempt to remove all objections, elaborate arguments have been presented to
prove that Alexander’s sentence of excommunication was in fact no
excommunication at all.1212 The sound
and judicious Catholic historians, Hefele-Knöpfler, do not hesitate to
pronounce his death a judicial murder.1213

By the general consent of
Protestants, Jerome Savonarola is numbered among the precursors of the
Reformation,—the view taken by Ranke. He was not an advocate of its
distinguishing tenet of justification by faith. The Roman church was for him
the mother of all other churches and the pope its head. In his Triumph of
the Cross, he distinctly asserts the seven sacraments as an appointment of
Christ and that Christ is "wholly and essentially present in each of the
eucharistic elements."
Nevertheless, he was an innovator and his exaltation of divine grace
accords with the teaching of the Reformation. Here all Protestants would have
fellowship with him as when he said:1214—

It is untrue that God’s grace is
obtained by pre-existing works of merit as though works and deserts were the
cause of predestination. On the contrary, these are the result of
predestination. Tell me, Peter; tell me, O Magdalene, wherefore are ye in
paradise? Confess that not by your own
merits have ye obtained salvation, but by the goodness of God.

Passages abound in his Meditations
like this one. "Not by their own deservings, O Lord, or by their own
works have they been saved, lest any man should be able to boast, but because it
seemed good in Thy sight."
Speaking of Savonarola’s Exposition of the Psalms, Luther said that,
although some clay still stuck to Savonarola’s theology, it is a pure and
beautiful example of what is to be believed, trusted and hoped from God’s mercy
and how we come to despair of works. And the whole-souled German Reformer
exclaimed, "Christ canonizes Savonarola through us even though popes and
papists burst to pieces over it."1215

The sculptor has given him a
place at the feet of Luther and at the side of Wyclif and Huss in the monument
of the Reformation at Worms. When Catholics, who heard that this was proposed,
wrote to show the impropriety of including the Florentine Dominican in such
company, Rietschel consulted Hase on the subject. The venerable Church
historian replied, "It makes no difference whether they counted Savonarola
a heretic or a saint, he was in either case a precursor of the Reformation and
so Luther recognized him."1216

The visitor in Florence to-day
finds two invisible personalities meeting him everywhere, Dante, whom the city
banished, and Savonarola, whom it executed. The spirit of theexecutioner has
vanished and the mention of Savonarola’s name strikes in all Florentines a
tender chord of admiration and love. In 1882, the signory placed his statue in
the Hall of the Five Hundred. There, a few yards from the place of his
execution, he stands in his Dominican habit and cowl, with his left hand
resting on a lion’s head and holding aloft in his right hand a crucifix, while
his clear eye is turned upwards. Again, on May 22,1901, the city honored the
friar by setting a circular bronze tablet with portrait on the spot where he
suffered death. A great multitude attended the dedication and one of the
wreaths of flowers bore the name of the Dominicans.

In Savonarola’s cell in St.
Mark’s has been placed a medallion head of the friar, and still another on the
cloistral wall over the spot where he was seized and made prisoner, and the
visitor will often find there a fresh wreath of flowers, a proof of the undying
memory of the Florentine preacher and patriot.

This was he,

Savonarola,—the
star-look shooting from the cowl.

—Browning, Casa Guido Windows.

§ 77. The Study and Circulation of the Bible.

The only biblical commentary of
the Middle Ages, conforming in any adequate sense to our modern ideas of
exegesis, was produced by Nicolas of Lyra, who died 1340. The exegesis of the
Schoolmen was a subversion of Scripture rather than an exposition. In their
hands, it was made the slave of dogma. Of grammatical and textual criticism
they had no conception and they lacked all equipment for the grammatical study
of the original Hebrew and Greek. What commentaries were produced in the
flourishing era of Scholasticism, were either collections of quotations from
the Fathers, called Chains,—catenae,
the most noted of which was the catena on the Gospels by Thomas Aquinas,—or, if
original works, they teemed with endless suggestions of the fancy and were like
continents of tropical vine-growths through which it is next to impossible to
find a clear path to Jesus Christ and the meaning of human life. The bulky
expositions of the Psalms, Job and other biblical books by such theologians as
Rupert of Deutz, Bonaventura and Albertus Magnus, are to-day intellectual
curiosities or, at best, manuals from which piety of the conventual type may be
fed. They bring out every other meaning but the historical and plain sense
intended by the biblical authors. Especially true is this of the Song of Songs,
which the Schoolmen made a hunting-ground for descriptions of the Virgin Mary.1217 It is said, Thomas Aquinas was engaged on the exposition of this
book when he died.

Thomas Aquinas, fully in accord
with this method, said that "the literal sense of Scripture is manifold,
its spiritual sense, threefold, viz., allegorical, moral and anagogical."1218 The literal sense teaches the things which have happened, the
allegorical what we are to believe, the moral what we are to do and the
anagogical directs to things to be awaited. The last three senses correspond to
faith, hope and charity. Hugo of Cher compared them to the four coverings of
the tabernacle, the four winds, the four wings of the cherubim, the four rivers
of paradise, the four legs of the Lord’s table. Here are specimens: Jerusalem,
literally, is a city in Palestine; allegorically, it is the Church; morally,
the faithful soul; anagogically, the heavenly Jerusalem. The Exodus from Egypt
is, historically, a fact; allegorically, the redemption of Christ; morally, the
soul’s conversion; anagogically, the departure for the heavenly land. In his
earliest years, Dean Colet followed this method. From Savonarola we would
expect it. The literal heaven, earth and light of Genesis 1:1,2, he expounded
as meaning allegorically, Adam, Eve and the light of grace or the Hebrews,
Gentiles and Jesus Christ; morally, the soul, body and active intelligence;
anagogically, angels, men and the vision of God. In his later years, Colet, in
answer to a letter from Erasmus, who insisted upon the fecundity of meanings of
Scripture texts, abandoned his former position and declared that their
fecundity consisted not in their giving birth to many senses but to one only
and that the truest.1219 In his
better moods, Erasmus laid stress upon the one historical, sense, applying to
the interpretation of the Bible the rule that is applied to other books.

After the Reformation was well
on its way, the old irrational method continued to be practised and Bishop
Longland, in a sermon on Prov. 9:1,2, preached in 1525, explained the words
"she hath furnished her table" to mean, that wisdom had set forth in
her spiritual banquet the four courses of history, tropology, anagogy and
allegory.1220 Three
years later,1528, Tyndale, the translator of the English Bible, had this to say
of the mediaeval system of exegesis and the new system which sought out the
literal sense of Scripture: —

The papists divide the Scripture
into four senses, the literal, tropological, allegorical and anagogical. The
literal sense has become nothing at all, for the pope hath taken it clean away
and hath made it his possession. He hath partly locked it up with the false and
counterfeited keys of his traditions, ceremonies and feigned lies. Thou shalt
understand that the Scripture hath but one sense, which is the literal sense,
and this literal sense is the root and ground of all and the anchor that never
faileth whereunto, if thou cleave, thou canst never err or go out of the way.1221

A decided step in the direction
of the, new exegesis movement was made by Nicolas of Lyra in his Postillae,
a brief commentary on the entire Bible.1222 This commentator, called by Wyclif the elaborate and skilful
annotator of Scripture,—tamen copiosus et ingeniosus postillator Scripturae,1223was born in Normandy, about
1270, and became professor in Paris where he remained till his death. He knew
Greek and learned Hebrew from a rabbi and his knowledge of that tongue gave
rise to the false rumor that he had a Jewish mother. Lyra made a new Latin
translation, commented directly on the original text and ventured at times to
prefer the comments of Jewish commentators to the comments of the Fathers. As
he acknowledged in his Introduction, he was much influenced by the writings of
Rabbi Raschi.

Lyra’s lasting merit lies in the
stress he laid upon the literal sense which he insisted should alone be
employed in establishing dogma. In practice, however, he allowed a secondary
sense, the mystical or typical, but he declared that it had been put to such
abuse as to have choked out—suffocare —
the literal sense. The language of Scripture must be understood in its natural
sense as we would expect our words to be understood.1224 His method aided in undermining the fanciful and pernicious
exegetical system of the Schoolmen who knew neither Greek nor Hebrew and
prepared the way for a new period of biblical exposition. He was used not only
by Wyclif and Gerson,1225but also by Luther, who acknowledged his services
in insisting upon the literal sense.

Although Wyclif wrote no
commentaries on books of Scripture, he gave expositions of the Lord’s Prayer
and the Decalogue and of many texts, which are thoroughly practical and
popular. In his treatise on the Truth of Scripture, he seems at times to
pronounce the discovery of the literal sense the only object of a sound
exegesis.1226 A
generation later Gerson showed an inclination to lay stress upon the literal
sense as fundamental but went no further than to say that it is to be accepted
so far as it is found to be in harmony with the teachings of the Church.1227

Later in the 15th century, the
free critical spirit which the Revival of Letters was begetting found pioneers
in the realm of exegesis in Laurentius Valla and Erasmus, Colet, Wesel and
Wessel. As has already been said, Valla not only called in question the
genuineness of Constantine’s donation, but criticised Jerome’s Vulgate and
Augustine. Erasmus went still farther when he left out of his Greek New
Testament,1516, the spurious passage about the three witnesses, 1 John 5:7,
though he restored it in the edition of 1522. He pointed out the discrepancy
between a statement in Stephen’s speech and the account in Genesis and questioned
the authorship of the Epistle to the Hebrews, the Apostolic origin of 2d and
3rd John and the Johannine authorship of the Apocalypse.

In opposition to such views the
Sorbonne, in 1526, declared it an error of faith to call in question the
authorship of any of the books of the New Testament. Erasmus recommended for
the student of the Scriptures a fair knowledge of Latin, Greek and Hebrew and
also that he be versed in other studies, especially the knowledge of natural
objects such as the animals, trees, precious stones and geography of Scripture.1228

The nearest approach to the
exegetical principles as well as doctrinal positions of the Reformers was made
by the Frenchman, Lefèvre d’Etaples, whose translations of the New Testament
and the Old Testament carry us into the period introduced by Luther. It
remained for Luther and the other Reformers to give to the literal or
historical sense its due weight, and especially from the sane grammatical
exegesis of John Calvin is a new period in the exposition of the sacred
writings to be dated.

The early printing-presses, from
Lyons to Paris and from Venice and Nürnberg to Cologne and Lübeck, eagerly
turned out editions of the entire Bible or parts of it, the vast majority of
which, however, gave the Latin text. The first printed Latin Bible, which
appeared at Mainz without date and in two volumes, belongs before 1455 and
bears the name of the Gutenberg Bible from the printer or the Mazarin Bible
from the copy which was found in the library of Cardinal Mazarin. Before 1520,
no less than 199 printed editions of the entire volume appeared. Of these,156
were Latin,17 German,—3 of the German editions being in Low German,—11 Italian,
2 Bohemian and one Russian.1229 Spain produced two editions, a Limousin version at Valencia,1478,
and the Complutensian Bible of Cardinal Ximenes,1514–1517. England was far
behind and her first printed English New Testament did not appear till 1526,
although Caxton had setup his printing-press at Westminster in 1477.

To the printed copies of the
whole Scriptures must be added the parts which appeared in plenaria and psalteria,—copies of the Gospels and of
the Psalms,1230— and in the postillae which contained the Scripture text with annotations.
From 1470–1520 no less than 103 postillae appeared from the press.1231

The number of copies of the
Bible sent off in a single edition is a matter of conjecture as must also be
the question whether copies were widely held by laymen.1232

The new path which Erasmus
struck out in his edition of the New Testament was looked upon in some quarters
as a dangerous path. Dorpius, one of the Louvain professors, in 1515,
anticipated the appearance of the book by remonstrating with Erasmus for his
bold project and pronounced the received Vulgate text free "from all
mixture of falsehood and mistake."
This, he alleged, was evident from its acceptance by the Church in all
ages and the use the Fathers had made of it. Another member of the Louvain
faculty, Latromus, employed his learning in a pamphlet which maintained that a
knowledge of Greek and Hebrew was not necessary for the scholarly study of the
Scriptures. In England, Erasmus’ New Testament was attacked on a number of
grounds by Lee, archbishop of York; and Standish, bishop of St. Asaph, preached
a furious sermon in St. Paul’s churchyard on Erasmus’ temerity in undertaking
the issue of such a work. The University of Cologne was especially outraged by
Erasmus’ attempt and Conrad of Hersbach wrote:1233—

They have found a language
called Greek, at which we must be careful to be on our guard. It is the mother
of all heresies. In the hands of many persons I see a book, which they call the
New Testament. It is a book full of thorns and poison. As for Hebrew my
brethren, it is certain that those who learn it will sooner or later turn Jews.

But among the men who read Erasmus’ text was Martin
Luther, and he was studying it to settle questions which started in his soul.
About one of these he asked his friend Spalatin to consult Erasmus, namely the
final meaning of the righteousness of the law, which he felt the great scholar
had misinterpreted in his annotations on the Romans in the Novum instrumentum. He believed, if Erasmus would
read Augustine’s works, he would change his mind. Luther preferred Augustine,
as he said, with the knowledge of one tongue to Jerome with his knowledge of
five.

Down to the very end of its
history, the mediaeval Church gave no official encouragement to the circulation
of the Bible among the laity. On the contrary, it uniformly set itself against
it. In 1199 Innocent III., writing to the diocese of Metz where the Scriptures
were being used by heretics, declared that as by the old law, the beast
touching the holy mount was to be stoned to death, so simple and uneducated men
were not to touch the Bible or venture to preach its doctrines.1234 The article of the Synod of Toulouse,1229, strictly forbidding the
Old and New Testaments to the laity either in the original text or in the
translation1235was not recalled or modified by papal or synodal
action. Neither after nor before the invention of printing was the Bible a free
book. Gerson was quite in line with the utterances of the Church, when he
stated, that it was easy to give many reasons why the Scriptures were not to be
put into the vulgar tongues except the historical sections and the parts
teaching morals.1236 In Spain,
Ferdinand and Isabella represented the strict churchly view when, on the eve of
the Reformation, they prohibited under severe penalties the translation of the
Scriptures and the possession of copies. The positive enactment of the English
archbishop, Arundel, at the beginning of the 15th century, forbidding the
reading of Wyclif’s English version, was followed by the notorious
pronouncement of Archbishop Bertholdt of Mainz against the circulation of the
German Bible, at the close of the same century,1485. The position taken by
Wyclif that the Scriptures, as the sole source of authority for creed and life,
should be freely circulated found full response in the closing years of the
Middle Ages only in the utterances of one scholar, Erasmus, but he was under
suspicion and always ready to submit himself to the judgment of the Church
hierarchic. If Wyclif said, "God’s law should be taught in that tongue
that is more known, for this wit [wisdom] is God’s Word," Erasmus in his Paraclesis1237uttered the equally bold words:
—

I utterly dissent from those who
are unwilling that the sacred Scriptures should be read by the unlearned
translated into their own vulgar tongue, as though the strength of the
Christian religion consisted in men’s ignorance of it. The counsels of kings
are much better kept hidden but Christ wished his mysteries to be published as
openly as possible. I wish that even the weakest woman should read the Gospel
and the epistles of Paul. And I wish they were translated into all languages,
so that they might be read and understood, not only by Scots and Irishmen but
also by Turks and Saracens, I long that the husbandman should sing portions of
them to himself as he follows the plow, that the weaver should hum them to the
tune of his shuttle, that the traveller should beguile with their stories the
tedium of his journey.

The utterances of Erasmus aside,
the appeals made 1450–1520 for the circulation of the Scriptures among all
classes are very sparse and, in spite of all pains, Catholic controversialists
have been able to bring together only a few. And yet, the few that we have show
that, at least in Germany and the Netherlands, there was a popular hunger for
the Bible in the vernacular. Thus, the Preface to the German Bible, issued at
Cologne,1480, called upon every Christian to read the Bible with devotion and
honest purpose. Though the most learned may not exhaust its wisdom, nevertheless
its teachings are clear and uncovered. The learned may read Jerome’s Vulgate
but the unlearned and simple folk could and should use the Cologne edition
which was in good German. The devotional manual, Die Himmelsthür,—Door
of Heaven,—1513, declared that listening to sermons ought to stir up people to
read diligently in the German Bible. In 1505, Jacob Wimpheling spoke of the
common people reading both Testaments in their mother-tongue and made this the
ground of an appeal to priests not to neglect to read the Word of God
themselves.1238

Such testimonies are more than
offset by warnings against the danger attending the popular use of Scriptures.
Brant spoke strongly in this vein and so did Geiler of Strassburg, who asserted
that putting the Scriptures into the hands of laymen was like putting a knife
into the hands of children to cut bread. He added that it "was almost a
wicked thing to print the sacred text in German."1239 Archbishop Bertholdt’s fulmination against German versions of the
Bible and their circulation among the people no doubt expressed the general
mind of the hierarchy in Germany and all Europe.1240 In this celebrated edict, the German primate pronounced the German
language too barbarous a tongue to reproduce the high thoughts expressed by
Greek and Latin writers, writing of the Christian religion. The Scriptures are
not to be given to simple and unlearned men and, above all, are not to be put
into the hands of women.1241 He spoke
of the fools who were using the divine gift of printing to send forth things
proscribed to the public and declared, that the printers of the sacred text
were moved by the vain love of fame or by greed. In his zeal, the archbishop
went so far as to forbid the translation of all works whatsoever, of Greek and
Latin authorship, or their sale without the sanction of the doctors of the
Universities of Mainz or Erfurt. The punishment for the violation of the edict
was excommunication, confiscation of books and a fine of 100 gulden.

The decree was so effective
that, after 1488, only four editions of the German Bible appeared until 1522,
when Luther issued his New Testament, when the old German translations seemed
to be suddenly laid aside.1242 In
England, Arundel’s inhibition so fully expressed the mind of the nation that
for a full century no attempt was made to translate the Bible into English and
it was not till after 1530 that the first copy of the English Scriptures was
published on English soil.1243 Sir
Thomas More, it is true, writing on the threshold of the English Reformation,
interpreted Arundel’s decree as directed against corrupt translations and
sought to make it appear that it was on account of errors that Wyclif’s version
had been condemned. He was striving to parry the charge that the Church had
withheld the Bible from popular use, but, whatever the interpretation put upon
his words may be (see this volume, p. 348), the fact remains that the English
were slow in getting any printed version of their own and that the Catholic
party issued none till the close of the 16th century.

Distinct witness is borne by
Tyndale to the unwillingness of the old party to have the Bible in English, in
these words: "Some of the papists say it is impossible to translate the
Scriptures into English, some that it is not lawful for the layfolk to have it
in the mother-tongue, some that it would make them all heretics."1244 After the new views were quite prevalent in England, the English
Bible had a hard time in winning the right to be read. Tyndale’s version, for
the printing of which he found no room in England, was at Wolsey’s instance
proscribed by Henry VIII. and the famous burning of 1527 in St. Paul’s churchyard
of all the copies Bishop Tonstall could lay his hands on will always rise up to
rebuke those who try to make it appear that the circulation of the Word of God
was intended by the Church authorities to be free. Tyndale declared that,
"in burning the New Testament, the papists did none other thing than I
looked for; no more shall they do if they burn me also." Any fears he may have had were realized in
his execution at Vilvorde,1536.1245 No doubt, the priest represented a large class when he rebuked
Tyndale for proposing to translate the Bible in the words, "We were better without God’s laws than
the pope’s." The martyr Hume’s
body was hung when an English Bible was found on his person. In 1543, the
reading of the Scriptures was forbidden in England except to persons of
quality. The Scotch joined the English authorities when the Synod of St.
Andrews,1529, forbade the importation of Bibles into Scotland.

In France, according to the
testimony of the famous printer Robert Stephens, who was born in 1503, the
doctors of the Sorbonne, in the period when he was a young man, knew about the
New Testament only from quotations from Jerome and the Decretals. He declared
that he was more than 50 years old before he knew anything about the New
Testament. Luther was a man before he saw a copy of the Latin Bible. In 1533,
Geneva forbade its citizens to read the Bible in German or French and ordered
all translations burnt.1246 The
strict inquisition of books would have passed to all countries, if the
hierarchy had had its way. In 1535, Francis I. closed the printing-presses and
made it a capital offence in France to publish a religious book without
authorization from the Sorbonne. The attitude of the Roman Catholic hierarchy,
since the Reformation as well as during the Reformation, has been against the
free circulation of the Bible. In the 19th century, one pope after another anathematized
Bible societies. In Spain, Italy and South America, the punishments visited
upon Bible colporteurs and the frequent burning of the Bible itself have been
quite in the line of the decrees of Arundel and Bertholdt and the treatment of
Bishop Tonstall. Nor will it be forgotten that, at the time Rome was made the
capital of Italy in 1870, a papal law required that copies of the Bible found
in the possession of visitors to the papal city be confiscated.

On the other hand, through the
agency of the Reformers, the book was made known and offered freely to all
classes. What use the Reformers hoped to make of printing for the dissemination
of religion and intelligence is tersely and quaintly expressed by the
martyrologist, Foxe, in these words:1247—

Either the pope must abolish
printing or he must seek a new world to reign over, for else, as the world
stands, printing will abolish him. The pope and all the cardinals must
understand this, that through the light of printing the world begins now to
have eyes to see and heads to judge .... God hath opened the press to preach,
whose voice the pope is never able to stop with all the puissance of the triple
crown. By printing as by the gift of tongues and as by the singular organ of
the Holy Ghost, the doctrine of the Gospel sounds to all nations and countries
under heaven and what God reveals to one man, is dispersed to many and what is
known to one nation is opened to all.

Note: –
Both Janssen and
Abbot Gasquet spend much pains in the attempt to show that the mediaeval Church
was not opposed to the circulation of the Bible in popular versions or the
Latin Vulgate. The proofs they bring forward must be regarded as strained and
insufficient. They ignore entirely the vast mass of testimony on the other
side, as, for example, the testimony involved in the popular reception given to
the German and English Scriptures when they appeared from the hands of the
Reformers and the mass of testimony given by the Reformers on the subject. Gasquet
endeavors to break the force of the argument drawn from Arundel’s edict, but he
has nothing to say of the demand Wyclif made for the popular dissemination of
the Bible, a demand which implied that the Bible was withheld from the people.
Dr. Barry who belongs to the same school, in the Cambr. Mod. Hist., I. 640,
speaks of "the enormous extent the Bible was read in the 15th
century" and that it was not "till we come within sight of the
Lutheran troubles that preachers, like Geiler of Kaisersberg, hint their doubts
on the expediency of unrestrained Bible-reading in the vernacular." What is to be said of such an exaggeration
in view of the fact that the vast majority of Bibles were in Latin, a language
which the people could not read, that Geiler died in 1510, seven years before
Luther ceased to be a pious Augustinian monk, and that he did very much more
than hint doubts! He expressed himself
unreservedly against Bible-reading. Janssen-Pastor,—I. 23 sqq., 72 sqq., VII.
535 sqq.—have a place for stray testimonies between 1480–1520 in favor of the
popular reading of the Scriptures, but, go far as I can see, do not refer to
the warnings of Brant, Geiler and others against their use by laymen, and the
only reference they make to Bertholdt’s notorious decree is to the clause in
which the archbishop emphasizes the divine art of printing, divina quaedam ars imprimendi, I. 15.

§ 78. Popular Piety.

During the last century of the
Middle Ages, the religious life of the laity was stimulated by some new
devices, especially in Germany. There, the effort to instruct the laity in the
matters of the Christian faith was far more vital and active than in any other
part of Western Christendom.

The popular need found
recognition in the illustrations, furnished in many editions of the early
Bibles. The Cologne Bible of 1480, the Lübeck Bible of 1494 and the Venice
Bible of Malermi,1497, are the best examples of this class of books. Fifteen of
the 17 German Bibles, issued before the Reformation, were illustrated.

A more distinct recognition of
this need was given in the so-called biblia pauperum,—Bibles for the poor,—first single sheets and then
books, containing as many as 40 or 50 pictures of biblical scenes.1248 In the first instance, they seem to have been intended to aid
priests in giving instruction. Side by side, they set scenes from the two
Testaments, showing the prophetic types and their fulfilments. Thus the
circumcisions of Abraham, Jacob and Christ are depicted in three separate
pictures, the priest being represented in the very act of circumcising Christ.
Explanations in Latin, German or French accompany the pictures.

An extract will give some idea
of the kind of information furnished by this class of literature. When Adam was
dying, he sent Seth into the garden to get medicine. The cherub gave him a
branch from the tree of life. When Seth returned, he found his father dead and
buried. He planted the branch and in 4000 years it grew to be the tree on which
the Saviour was crucified.

The best executed of these
biblical picture-books are those in Constance,1249St. Florian, Austria and in the
libraries of Munich and Vienna. The name, biblia pauperum, may have been derived from Bonaventura or the
statement of Gregory the Great, that pictures are the people’s bible. In 1509,
Lukas Kranach issued the passion in a series of pictures at Wittenberg.

A marked and most hopeful
novelty in Germany were the numerous manuals of devotion and religious
instruction which were issued soon after the invention of printing. This
literature bears witness to the intelligent interest taken in religious
training, although its primary purpose was not for the young but to furnish a
guide-book for the confessional and to serve priest and layman in the hour of
approaching death.1250 These
books are, for the most part, in German, and probably had a wide circulation.
They show common Christians what the laws of God are for daily life and what
are the chief articles of the Church’s faith. Some of the titles give us an
idea of the intent,—The Soul’s Guide, Der Seelenführer; Path to Heaven, Die
Himmelstrasse;
The Soul’s Comfort, Der Seelentrost; The Heart’s Counsellor, Der
Herzmahner; The
Devotional Bell, Das andächtige Zeitglöcklein; The Foot-Path to Eternal
Bliss, Der Fusspfad zur ewigen Seligkeit; The Soul’s Vegetable Garden, Das
Seelenwürzgärtlein; The Soul’s Vineyard, Der Weingarten der Seele; The Spiritual Chase, Die
geistliche Jagd.
Others were known by the general title of Beichtbüchlein—libri
di penitentia —
or penitential books.

A compendious statement of their
intent is given in the title of the Seelenführer,1251namely "The Soul’s Guide, a
useful book for every Christian to practise a pious life and to reach a holy
death." This literature deserves
closer attention both because it represents territory hitherto largely
neglected by students of the later Middle Ages and because it bears witness to
the zeal among the German clergy to spread practical religion among the people.
The Himmelwagen, the Heavenly Carriage, represents the horses as faith,
love, repentance, patience, peace, humility and obedience. The Trinity is the
driver, the carriage itself God’s mercy.

With variations, these little
books explain the 10 Commandments, the 14 articles of the Creed—the number into
which it was then divided—the Lord’s Prayer, the Beatitudes, mortal sins, the 5
senses, the works of mercy and other topics. The Soul’s Comfort, which
appeared in 16 editions,1474–1523,1252takes up the 10 Commandments, 7
sacraments, 8 Beatitudes, 6 works of mercy, the 7 spiritual gifts, 7 mortal
sins and 7 cardinal virtues and "what God further thinks me worthy of
knowing." Most useful as this
little book was adapted to be, it sometimes states truth under strange forms,
as when it tells of a man whose soul after death was found, not in his body but
in his money-chest and of a girl who, while dancing on Friday, was violently
struck by the devil but recovered on giving her promise to amend her ways.

The Path to Heaven contains
52 chapters. The first two set forth faith and hope, the joys of the elect and
the pains of the lost and it closes with 4 chapters describing a holy death,
the devil’s modes of tempting the dying and questions which are to be put to
sick people. Dietrich Kolde’s Mirror of a Christian Man, one of the most
popular of the manuals, in the first two of its 46 chapters, took up the
Apostles’ Creed and, in the last, the marks of a good Christian man. The first
edition appeared before 1476; the 23d at Delfft,1518.1253

Many of the manuals expressly
set forth the value of the family religion and call upon parents to teach their
children the Creed, the 10 Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer, to have them pray
morning and evening and to take them to church to hear the mass and preaching. The
Soul’s Guide says, "The Christian home should be the first school for
young children and their first church."

The Path to Heaven,1254written by Stephen von Landskron
or Lanzkranna, dean of Vienna, d. 1477, presents a very attractive picture of a
Christian household. As a model for imitation, the head of a family is
represented as going to church with his wife, children and servants every
Sunday and listening to the preaching. On returning home, he reviews the
subject of the sermon and hears them recite the Commandments, Lord’s Prayer and
Creed and the 7 mortal sins. Then, after he has refreshed himself with a
draught, Trinklein, they sing a song to God or Mary or to one of the saints.
The Soul’s Comfort counsels parents to examine their households about
the articles of faith and the precepts the children had learned at school and
at church. The Table of a Christian Life1255urges the parents to keep their
children off the streets, send them to school, making a selection of their
teachers and, above all, to live well themselves and "go before"
their children in the practice of all the virtues.

Of the penitential books,
designed distinctly as manuals of preparation for the confessional, the work of
John Wolff is the most elaborate and noteworthy. This good man, who was
chaplain at St. Peter’s, Frankfurt, wrote his book 1478.1256 He was deeply interested in the impartation of religious
instruction. His tombstone, which was unearthed in 1895, calls him the
"doctor of the 10 Commandments" and gives a representation of the 10
Commandments in 10 pictures, each Commandment being designated by a hand with
one or more fingers uplifted. Such tables it was not an uncommon thing, in the
last years of the Middle Ages, to hang on the walls of churches.

Wolff’s book, which is a guide
for daily Christian living, sets forth at length the 10 Commandments and the
acts and inward thoughts which are in violation of them, and puts into the
mouth of the offender an appropriate confession. Thus, confessing to a
violation of the 4th Commandment, the offender says, "I have done on
Friday rough work, in farming, dunging the fields, splitting wood, spinning,
sewing, buying and selling, dancing, striking people at the dance, playing
games and doing other sinful things. I did not hear mass or preaching and was
remiss in the service of Almighty God."
Upon the exposition of the Decalogue follow lists of the five baser
sins,—usury, killing, stealing, sodomy and keeping back wages,—the 6 sins
against the Holy Ghost, the 7 works of mercy such as visiting the sick,
clothing the naked and burying the dead, the sacraments, the Beatitudes, the 7
gifts of the Holy Ghost and an exposition of repentance. The work closes with a
summary of the advantages to be derived from the frequent repetition of the 10
Commandments and mentions 13 excuses, given for not repeating them, such as
that the words are hard to remember and the unwillingness to have them as a
perpetual monitor.

These manuals, having in view
the careful instruction of adults and children, indicate a new era in the
history of religious training. No catechisms have come down to us from the
ancient Church. The catechumens to whom Augustine and Cyril addressed their catechetical
discourses were adults. In the 13th century, synods began to call for the
preparation of summaries of religious knowledge for laymen. So a synod at
Lambeth,1281, Prag,1355, and Lavaur, France,1368. The Synod of Tortosa,1429,
ordered its prelates to secure the preparation of a brief compendium containing
in concise paragraphs all that it was necessary for the people to know and that
might be explained to them every Sunday during the year by their pastors.
Gerson approached the catechetical method (see this volume, p. 216 sq.) and,
after long years of activity made the statement that the reformation of the
church must begin with children, a parvulis ecclesiae reparatio et ejus cultura
incipienda.1257 In his Tripartite work he presents the Ten Commandments,
confession and thoughts for the dying. The catechetical form of question and
answer was not adopted till after the Lutheran Reformation was well on its way.
The term, catechism, as a designation of such a manual was first used by
Luther,1525, and the first book to bear the title was Andreas Althammer’s
Catechism, which appeared in 1528. Luther’s two catechisms were issued one year
later. The first Catholic book to bear the title was prepared by George
Wicelius,1535.

In England, we have something
similar to the German penitential books in the Prymers,1258the first copy of which dates
from 1410. They were circulated in Latin and English, and were intended for the
instruction of the laity. They contained the calendar, the Hours of our Lady,
the litany, the Lord’s Prayer, Creed, Ten Commandments, 7 Penitential Psalms,
the 7 deadly sins, prayers and other matters. The book is referred to by Piers
Plowman, and frequently in the 15th century, as one well known.1259 The Horn-book also deserves mention. This device for
teaching the alphabet and the Lord’s Prayer consisted of a rectangular board
with a handle, to be held like a modern hand-mirror. On one or both sides were
cut or printed the letters of the alphabet and the Lord’s Prayer. Horn-books
were probably not in general use till the close of the 16th century, but they
date back to the middle of the 15th. They probably got their name from a piece
of animal horn with which the face of the written matter was covered as a
protection against grubby fingers.1260

A nearer approach to the
catechetical idea was made by Colet in his rudiments of religious knowledge
appended to his elementary grammar, and intended for use in St. Paul’s School.
It contains the Apostles’ Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, an exposition of the love
due God and our fellowmen, 46 special "precepts of living," and two
prayers, and is generally known as the Catecheyzon.1261

Religious instruction was also
given through the series of pictures known as the Dance of Death, and through
the miracle plays.1262 In the
Dance of Death, a perpetual memento mori, death was represented in the figure of a skeleton appearing to persons
in every avocation of life and of every class. None were too holy or too
powerful to evade his intrusion and none too humble to be beyond his notice.
Death wears now a serious, now a comic aspect, now politely leads his victim,
now walks arm in arm with him, now drags him or beats him. An hour-glass is
usually found somewhere in the pictures, grimly reminding the onlooker that the
time of life is certain to run out. These pictures were painted on bridges,
houses, church windows and convent walls. Among the oldest specimens are those
in Minden,1383, at Paris in the churchyard of the Franciscans,1425, Dijon,1436,
Basel,1441, Croyden, the Tower of London, Salisbury Cathedral,1460,
Lübeck,1463.1263

In the fifteenth century, the
religious drama was in its bloom in Germany and England.1264 The acting was now turned over to laymen and the public squares
and streets were preferred for the performances. The people looked on from the
houses as well as from the streets. In 1412, while the play of St. Dorothea was
being acted in the market-place at Bautzen, the roof of one of the houses fell
and 33 persons were killed. The introduction of buffoonery and farce had become
a recognized feature and lightened the impression without impairing the
religious usefulness of the plays. The devil was made a subject of perpetual
jest and fun. The people found in them an element of instruction which,
perhaps, the priest did not impart. The scenes enacted reached from the
Creation and the fall of Lucifer to the Last Judgment and from Abel’s death and
Isaac’s sacrifice to the crucifixion and resurrection.

Set forth by living actors, the
miracle plays and moralities were to the Middle Ages what the Pilgrim’s
Progress was to Puritans. They were performed from Rome to London, at the
marriage and visits of princes and for the delectation of the people. We find
them presented before Sigismund and prelates during the solemn discussions of
the Council of Constance, as when the play of the Nativity and the Slaughter of
the Innocents was acted at the Bishop of Salisbury’s lodgings,1417, and at St.
Peter’s, as when the play of Susannah and the Elders was performed in honor of
Leonora, daughter of Ferrante of Naples,1473. At a popular dramatization of the
parable of the 10 Virgins in Eisenach,1324, the margrave, Friedrich, was so
moved by the pleas of the 5 foolish maidens and the failure to secure the aid
of Mary and the saints, that he cried out, "What is the Christian religion
worth, if sinners cannot obtain mercy through the intercession of
Mary?" The story went, that he
became melancholy and died soon afterwards.

Of the four English cycles of
miracle plays, York, Chester, Coventry and Towneley or Wakefield, the York
cycle dates back to 1360 and contained from 48 to 57 plays. Chester and
Coventry were the traditional centres of the religious drama. The stage or
pageant, as it was called, was wheeled through the streets. The playing was
often in the hands of the guilds, such as the barbers, tanners, plasterers,
butchers, spicers, chandlers.1265 The paying of actors dates from the 14th century.

Chester cycles was Noah’s Flood,
a subject popular everywhere in mediaeval Europe. After God’s announcement to
the patriarch, his 3 sons and their wives offered to take hand in the building
of the ark. Noah’s wife alone held out and scolded while the others worked. In
spite of Noah’s well-known quality of patience, her husband exclaimed: —

Lord, these women be
crabbed, aye

And none are meke, I
dare well says.

Nothing daunted, however, the patriarch went on with his
hammering and hewing and remarked: —

The ark finished, each party
brought his portion of animals and birds. But when they were housed, Noah’s
help-meet again proved a disturbing element. Noah bade Shem go and fetch her.

Sem, sonne,
loe! thy mother is wrawe (angry).

Shem told her they were about to set sail, but still she
resisted entreaty and all hands were called to join together and "fetch
her in."

One of the best of the English
plays, Everyman, has for its subject the inevitableness of death and the
judgment.1267 God sends
Death to Everyman and, in his attempt to withstand his message, Everyman calls
upon his friends Fellowship, Riches, Strength, Beauty and Good Works for help
or, at least, to accompany him on his pilgrimage. This with one consent they
refused to do. He then betook himself to Penance, and has explained to him the
powers of the priesthood: —

God hath to priest
more power given

Than to any angel
that is in heaven.

With five words, he
may consecrate

God’s body in flesh
and blood to take

And handleth his
Maker between his hands:

The priest bindeth
and unbindeth all bands

Both in earth and in
heaven,

He ministers all the
sacraments seven.

Such plays were impressive
sermons, a popular summer-school of moral and religious instruction, the
mediaeval Chatauqua. They continued to be performed in England till the 16th
century and even till the reign of James I., when the modern drama took their
place. The last survival of the religious drama of the Middle Ages is the
Passion Play given at Oberammergau in the highlands of Bavaria. In obedience to
a vow, made during a severe epidemic in 1684, it has been acted every ten years
since and more often in recent years. Since 1860, the performances have
attracted throngs of spectators from foreign lands, a performance being set for
1910. Writers have described it as a most impressive sermon on the most
momentous of scenes, as it is a solemn act of worship for the simple-hearted,
pious Catholics of that remote mountain village.

Pilgrimages and the worship of
relics were as popular in the 16th century as they had been in previous periods
of the Middle Ages.1268 Guide-books for pilgrims were circulated in Germany and England
and contained vocabularies as well as items of geography and other details.1269 Jerusalem continued to attract the feet of princes and prelates as
well as persons of less exalted estate. Frederick the Wise of Saxony, Luther’s
cautious but firm friend, was one of these pilgrims in the last days of the
Middle Ages. William Wey of England, who in 1458 and 1462, went to the Holy
Land, tells us how the pilgrims sang "O city dear Jerusalem," Urbs beata, as they landed at Joppa. Sir
Richard Torkington and Sir Thomas Tappe, both ecclesiastics, made the journey
the same year that Luther nailed up the Theses,1517. The journeys to Rome
during the Jubilee Years of 1450,1500, drew vast throngs of people, eager to
see the holy city and concerned to secure the religious benefits promised by
the supreme pontiff. Local shrines also attracted constant streams of pilgrims.

Among the popular shrines in
Germany were the holy blood at Stemberg from 1492, the image of Mary at
Grimmenthal from 1499, as a cure for the French sickness, the head of St. Anna
at Düren from 1500, this relic having been stolen from Mainz. The holy coat of
Treves was brought to light in 1512. As in the flourishing days of the
Crusades, so again, pilgrimage-epidemics broke out among the children of
Germany, as in 1457 when large bands went to St. Michael’s in Normandy and in
1475 to Wilsnack, where, in spite of the exposure by Nicolas of Cusa, the blood
was still reputed holy.1270 The most
noted places of pilgrimage in Germany were Cologne with the bodies of the three
Magi-kings and Aachen, where Mary’s undergarment, Jesus’ swaddling-cloth and
the loin-cloth he wore on the cross and other priceless relics are kept. Some
idea of the popularity of pilgrimages may be had from the numbers that are
given, though it is possible they are exaggerated. In 1466, 130,000 attended
the festival of the angels at Einsiedeln, Switzerland, and in 1496 the porter
at the gate of Aachen counted 146,000.1271 In the 14 days, when the relics were displayed, 85,000 gulden were
left in the money-boxes of St. Mary’s, Aachen.

Imposing religious processions
were also popular, such as the procession at Erfurt,1483, in a time of drought.
It lasted from 5 in the morning till noon, the ranks passing from church to
church. Among those who took part were 948 children from the schools, the
entire university-body comprising 2,141 persons, 812 secular priests, the monks
of 5 convents and a company of 2,316 maidens with their hair hanging loosely
down their backs and carrying tapers in their hands. German synods called
attention to the abuses of the pilgrimage-habit and sought to check it.1272

English pilgrims, not satisfied
with going to Rome, Jerusalem and the sacred places on their own island, also
turned their footsteps to the tomb of St. James of Compostella, Spain. In 1456,
Wey conducted 7 ship-loads of pilgrims to this Spanish locality. Among the
popular English shrines were St. Edmund of Bury, St. Ethelred of Ely, the holy
hood of Boxley, the holy blood of Hailes and, more popular than all, Thomas à
Becket’s tomb at Canterbury and our Blessed Lady of Walsingham. So much
frequented was the road to Walsingham that it was said, Providence set the
milky way in the place it occupies in the heavens that it might shine directly
upon it and direct the devout to the sacred spot. These two shrines were
visited by unbroken processions of religious itinerants, including kings and
queens as well as people less distinguished. Reference has already been made to
Erasmus’ description, which he gives in his Colloquies. At Walsingham,
he was shown the Virgin’s shrine rich with jewels and ornaments of silver and
gold and lit up by burning candles. There, was the wicket at which the pilgrim
had to stoop to pass but through which, with the Virgin’s aid, an armed knight
on horseback had escaped from his pursuer. The Virgin’s congealed milk, the
cool scholar has described with particular precision. Asking what good reason
there was for believing it was genuine, the verger replied by pointing him to
an authentic record hung high up on the wall. Walsingham was also fortunate
enough to possess the middle joint of one of Peter’s fingers.

At Canterbury, Erasmus and Colet
looked upon Becket’s skull covered with a silver case except at the spot where
the fatal dagger pierced it and Colet, remarking that Thomas was good to the
poor while on earth, queried whether now being in heaven he would not be glad
to have the treasures, stored in his tomb, distributed in alms. When a chest
was opened and the monk held up the rags with which the archbishop had blown
his nose, Colet held them only a moment in his fingers and let them drop in
disgust. It was said by Thomas à Kempis, that rarely are they sanctified who
jaunt about much on pilgrimages—raro sanctificantur, qui multum peregrinantur.1273 One of the German penitential books exclaimed, "Alas! how
seldom do people go on pilgrimages from right motives." Twenty-five years after the visits of
Erasmus and Colet, the canons of Walsingham, convicted of forging relics, were
dragged by the king’s order to Chelsea and burnt and the tomb of St. Thomas was
rifled of its contents and broken up.

Saints continued to be in high
favor. Every saint has his distinct office allotted to him, said Erasmus
playfully. One is appealed to for the toothache, a second to grant easy
delivery in childbirth, a third to lend aid on long journeys, a fourth to
protect the farmer’s live stock. People prayed to St. Christopher every morning
to be kept from death during the day, to St. Roche to be kept from contagion
and to St. George and St. Barbara to be kept from falling into the hands of
enemies. He suggested that these fabulous saints were more prayed to than Peter
and Paul and perhaps than Christ himself.1274 Sir Thomas More, in his defence of the worship of saints,
expressed his astonishment at the "madness of the heretics that barked
against the custom of Christ’s Church."

The encouragement, given at Rome
to the worship of relics, had a signal illustration in the distinguished
reception accorded the head of St. Andrew by the Renaissance pope, Pius II. In
Germany, princes joined with prelates in making collections of sacred bones and
other objects in which miraculous virtue was supposed to reside and whose
worship was often rewarded by the almost infinite grace of indulgence. In
Germany, in the 15th century as in Chaucer’s day in England, the friars were
the indefatigable purveyors of this sort of merchandise, from the bones of
Balaam’s ass to the straw of the manger and feathers from St. Michael’s wings.
The Nürnberger, Nicolas Muffel, regretted that, after the effort of 33 years,
he had only been able to bring together 308 specimens. Unfortunately this did
not keep him from the crime of theft and the penalty of the gallows.1275 In Vienna, were shown such rarities as a piece of the ark, drops
of sweat from Gethsemane and some of the incense offered by the Wise Men from
the East. Albrecht, archbishop of Mainz, helped to collect no less than 8,138
sacred fragments and 42 entire bodies of saints. This collection, which was
deposited at Halle, contained the host—that is, Christ’s own body—which Christ
offered while he was in the tomb, a statue of the Virgin with a full bottle of
her milk hanging from her neck, several of the pots which had been used at Cana
and a portion of the wine Jesus made, as well as some of the veritable manna
which the Hebrews had picked up in the desert, and some of the earth from a
field in Damascus from which God made Adam.

A most remarkable collection was
made by no less a personage than Frederick the Wise of Saxony.1276 A rich description of its treasures has been preserved from the
hand of Andreas Meinhard, then a new master of arts. On his way to
Wittenberg,1507, he met a raw student about to enter the university, Reinhard
by name. The elector had made good use of the opportunities his pilgrimages to
Jerusalem furnished and succeeded in obtaining the very respectable number of
5,005 sacred pieces. The collection was displayed for over a year in the Schlosskirche,
where Meinhard and his travelling companion looked at it with wondering eyes
and undoubting confidence. Among the pieces were a thorn from the crown of
thorns, a tunic belonging to John the Evangelist, milk from the Virgin’s
breast, a piece of Mt. Calvary, a piece of the table on which the Last Supper
was eaten, fragments of the stones on which Christ stood when he wept over
Jerusalem and as he was about to ascend to heaven, the entire body of one of
the Bethlehem Innocents, one of the fingers of St. Anna, "the most blessed
of grandmothers,"—beatissimae aviae,—pieces of the rods of Aaron and Moses, a piece of Mary’s girdle and
some of the straw from the Bethlehem manger. Good reason had Meinhard to remark
that, if the grandfathers had been able to arise from the dead, they would have
thought Rome itself transferred to Wittenberg. Each of these fragments was
worth 100 days of indulgence to the worshipper. The credulity of Frederick, the
collector, and the people betrays the atmosphere in which Luther was brought up
and the struggle it must have cost him to attack the deep-seated beliefs of his
generation.

The religious reverence paid to
the Virgin could not well go beyond the stage it reached in the age of the
greater Schoolmen nor could more flattering epithets be heaped upon her than
were found in the works of Albertus Magnus and Bonaventura. Mary was more
easily entreated than her Son. The Horticulus animae,—Garden of the Soul,—tells the story of a cleric,
accustomed to say his Ave Marias devoutly every day, to whom the Lord appeared and said, that his mother
was much gratified at the priest’s prayers and loved him much but that he
should not forget also to direct prayers to himself. The book, Heavenly
Wagon, called upon sinners to take refuge in her mantle, where full mercy
and pardon would be found.1277 Erasmus
remarked that Mary’s blind devotees, praying to her on all occasions,
considered it manners to place the mother before the Son.1278 In 1456, Calixtus III. commended the use of the Ave Maria as a protection against the
Turks. English Prymers contained the salutations,

Blessid art thou virgyn marie,
that hast born the lord maker of the world: thou hast getyn hym that made thee,
and thou dwellist virgyne withouten ende. Thankis to god.

The doctrine of the Immaculate
Conception in its extreme form, exempting Mary from the beginning from all
taint of original sin, was defined by the Council of Basel1280but the decision has no
oecumenical authority. Sixtus IV.,1477 and 1483, declared the definition of the
dogma still an open question, the Holy See not having pronounced upon the
subject. But the University of Paris,1497, in emphatic terms decided for the doctrine
and bound its members to the tenet by an oath. Erasmus, comparing the subtlety
of the Schoolmen with the writings of the Apostles, observed that, while the
former hotly contended over the Immaculate Conception, the Apostles who knew
Mary well never undertook to prove that she was immune from original sin.1281

To the worship of Mary was added
the worship of Anna, Mary’s reputed mother. The names of Mary’s parents, Anna
and Joachim, were received from the Apocryphal Gospels of James and the
Infancy. Jerome and Augustine had treated the information with suspicion as
also the further information that the couple were married in Bethlehem and
lived in Nazareth, had angelic announcements of the birth of Mary and that,
upon Joachim’s death, Anna married a second and a third time. The Crusaders
brought relics of her with them to Western Europe and gradually her claim found
recognition. Her cult spread rapidly. In Alexander VI. she found a
distinguished devotee. Churches and hospitals were built to her memory.
Trithemius wrote a volume in her praise and artists, like Albrecht Dürer,
joined her with Mary on the canvas.1282 She was claimed as a patron saint by women in childbirth and by
the copper miners. Luther himself was one of her ardent worshippers. Both
Albrecht of Mainz and Frederick the Wise were fortunate enough to have in their
collections of relics, each, one of the fingers of the saint.1283

If sacred poetry is any test of
the devotion paid to a saint, then the Virgin Mary was far and away the chief
personage to whom worshippers in the last centuries of the Middle Ages looked
for help. The splendid collection issued by Blume and Dreves,—Analecta hymnica,—filling now nearly 8,000 pages,
gives the material from which a judgment can be formed as to the relative
amount of attention writers of hymns and sequences paid to the Godhead, to Mary
and to the other saints. Number XLII., containing 336 hymns, gives 37 addressed
to Christ,110 to Mary and 189 to other saints. Number XLVI. devotes 102 to
Mary. These numbers are taken at random. Here are introductory verses from
several of the thousands of hymns which were composed in praise of her virtues
and the efficacy of her intercession:—

In England, singing sacred songs
seems to have been little cultivated before the 16th century. The singing of
Psalms in the days of Anne Boleyn was a novelty and was greatly enjoyed at the
court as it was later in Elizabeth’s reign, on the streets. The vast numbers of
sacred pieces, written in Germany, France and the Lowlands, were intended for
conventual devotions not for popular use.1290 Singing, however, was practised extensively in pilgrimages and
processions and also in churches, and the Basel synod at its 21st session
complained that the public services were interrupted by hymns in the vernacular.
Germany took the lead in sacred popular music. From 1470–1520, nearly 100 hymns
were printed from German presses, many of them with original tunes. Sometimes
the hymns were in German from beginning to end, sometimes they were a mixture
of Latin and German. As the Middle Ages drew to a close, religious song
increased. The Reformation established congregational singing and begat the
congregational hymnbook.1291

These adjuncts and elements of
Christian worship and training were added to the usual service of the churches,
the celebration of the mass, which was central, the confessional and preaching.
The age was religious but doubt was growing. A writer of the 16th century says
of England:1292

There are many who have various
opinions concerning religion but all attend mass every day and say many pater nosters in public, the women carrying
long rosaries in their hands and any who can read taking the Hours of our Lady
with them and reciting them in church verse by verse in a low voice is the
manner of the religious. They always hear mass in their parish church on Sunday
and give liberal alms nor do they omit any form incumbent upon good Christians.

The age of a more intelligent
piety was still to come, though it was to prove itself less submissive to human
authority.

§ 79. Works of Charity.

Benevolence and philanthropy,
which are of the very essence of the Christian religion, flourished in the
later Middle Ages. In the endeavor to provoke his generation to good works,
Luther asserted that "in the good old papal times everybody was merciful
and kind. Then it snowed endowments and legacies and hospitals."1293 Institutions were established to care for the destitute and sick,
colleges and bursaries were endowed and protection given to the dependent
against the rapacity of unscrupulous money-lenders.

The modern notion of stamping
out sickness by processes of sanitation scarcely occurred to the mediaeval
municipalities. Although the population of Europe was not 1/10 of what it is to-day, disease
was fearfully prevalent. No epidemics so fatal as the Black Death appeared in
Europe but, even in England, the return of plagues was frequent, as in
1406,1439,1464,1477. The famine of 1438, called the Great Famine, was followed
the next year by the Great Pestilence, called also the pestilence sans merci. In 1464, to follow the Chronicle
of Croyland, thousands, "died like slaughtered sheep." The sweating sickness of 1485 reappeared in
1499 and 1504. In the first epidemic, 20,000 died in London and, in 1504, the
mayor of the city succumbed. The disease took people suddenly and was marked by
a chill, which was followed by a fiery redness of the skin and agonizing thirst
that led the victims to drink immoderately. Drinking was succeeded by sweating
from every pore.1294

Provision was made for the sick
and needy through the monasteries, gilds and brotherhoods as well as by
individual assistance and state collections. The care of the poor was in
England regarded as one of the primary functions of the Church. Archbishop
Stratford,1342, ordered that a portion of the tithe should be invariably set
apart for their needs. The neglect of the poor was alleged as one of the crying
omissions of the alien clergy.

Doles for the poor, a common
form of charity in England, were often provided for on a large scale. During
the 40 days the duke of Gaunt’s body was to remain unburied, 50 marks were to
be distributed daily until the 40th day, when the amount was to be increased to
500 marks. Bishop Skirland wanted 200 given away between his death and his
interment. A draper of York gave by will 100 beds with furniture to as many
poor folk. A cloth-maker made a doubtful charity when he left a suit of his own
make to 13 poor people, with the condition that they should sit around his
coffin for 8 days. There were houses, says Thorold Rogers, where doles of bread
and beer were given to all wayfarers, houses where the sick were treated, clothed
and fed, particularly the lepers. One of the hospitals that survives is St.
Crow at Winchester for old and indigent people.1295 The cook Ketel, a Brother of the Common Life, whose biography
Thomas à Kempis wrote, said it would be better to sell all the books of the
house at Deventer and give more to the poor.

Hospitals, in the earlier part
of our period, were the special concern of the knights of the Teutonic Order
and continued throughout the whole of it to engage the attention of the
Beguines. It became the custom also for the Beguines to go as nurses to private
houses as in Cologne, Frankfurt, Treves, Ulm and other German cities, receiving
pay for their services.1296 The
Beguinages in Bruges, Ghent, Antwerp andother cities of Belgium and Holland
date back to this period. The 15th century also witnessed the growth of
municipal hospitals, a product of the civic spirit which had developed in
North-Europe. Cities like Cologne, Lübeck and Augsburg had several hospitals.
The Hotel de Dieu, Paris, did not come under municipal control till 1505.
In cases, admission to hospitals was made by their founders conditional on
ability to say the Lord’s Prayer, the Creed and the Ave Maria, as for example to St.
Anthony’s, Augsburg. In this case, the founder took care to provide for
himself, requiring the inmates on entering to say 100 Pater nosters and 100 Ave Marias over his grave and every day to
join in saying over it 15 of each.1297 Damian of Löwen and his wife, who endowed a hospital at
Cologne,1450, stipulated that "the very poorest and sickest were to be
taken care of whether they belonged to Cologne or were strangers."

Rome had more than one hospital
endowment. The foundation of Cardinal John Colonna at the Lateran, made 1216,
still remains. In his History of the Popes (III. 51), Pastor has given a
list of the hospitals and other institutions of mercy in the different states
of Italy and justly laid stress upon this evidence of the power of Christianity.
The English gilds, organized, in the first instance, for economic and
industrial purposes, also pledged relief to their own sick and indigent
members. The gild of Corpus Christi at York provided 8 beds for poor people and
paid a woman by the year 14 shillings and fourpence to keep them. The gild of
St. Helena at Beverley cared constantly for 3 or 4 poor folk.1298

Leprosy decreased during the
last years of the Middle Ages, but hospitals for the reception of lepers are
still extensively found,—the lazarettos, so called after Lazarus, who was
reputed to have been afflicted with the disease. Houses for this malady had
been established in England by Lanfranc, Mathilda, queen of Henry I. at St.
Giles, by King Stephen at Burton, Leicestershire and by others till the reign
of John. St. Hugh of Lincoln, as well as St. Francis d’Assissidistinguished
themselves by their solicitude for lepers. But the disease seems to have died
out in England in the 14th century and it was hard to fill the beds endowed for
this class of sufferers. In 1434, it was ordered that beds be kept for 2 lepers
in the great Durham leper hospital "provided they could be found in these
parts." Originally the hospital
had beds for 60.1299 Late in
the 16th century there were still lepers in Germany. Thomas Platter wrote,
"When we came to Munich, it was so late that we could not enter the city,
but had to remain in the leperhouse."1300

Begging was one of the curses of
England and Germany as it continues to be of Southern Europe to-day. It was no
disgrace to ask alms. The mendicant friars by their example consecrated a
nuisance with the sacred authority of religion. Pilgrims and students also had
the right of way as beggars. Sebastian Brant gave a list of the different
ecclesiastical beggars who went about with sacks, into which they put with
indiscriminate greed apples, plums, eggs, fish, chickens, meat, butter and
cheese,—sacks which had no bottom.

Der Bettler Sack wird nimmer voll;

Wie man ihn füllt, so bleibt er hohl.

In Germany, towns gave franchises to beg.1301 The habit of mendicancy, which Brant ridiculed, Geiler of
Strassburg called upon the municipality to regulate or forbid altogether. In
England, mendicancy was a profession recognized in law.

With the decay of the monastic
endowments and the legal maintenance of wages at a low rate, the destitution
and vagrancy increased. The English statutes of laborers at the close of this
period,1495 and 1504, ordered beggars, not able to work, to return to their own
towns where they might follow the habit of begging without hindrance.1302

At a time when in Germany, the
richest country of Europe, church buildings were multiplying with great
rapidity, many churches in England, on account of the low economic conditions,
were actually left to go to ruin or turned into sheepcotes and stables, a
transmutation to which Sir Thomas More as well as others refers. The rapacity
of the nobles and abbots in turning large areas into sheep-runs deprived
laborers of employment and brought social distress upon large numbers. On the
other hand, parliament passed frequent statutes of apparel, as in 1463 and
1482, restricting the farmer and laborer in his expenditure on dress. The
different statutes of laborers, enacted during the 15th century, had the effect
of depressing and impoverishing the classes dependent upon the daily toil of
their hands.1303

In spite of the strict synodal
rules, repeated again and again, usury was practised by Christians as well as
by Jews. All the greater Schoolmen of the 13th century had discussed the
subject of usury and pronounced it sin, on the ground of Luke 6:34, and other
texts. They held that charges of interest offended against the law of love to
our neighbor and the law of natural fairness, for money does not increase with
use but rather is reduced in weight and value. It is a species of greed which
is mortal sin.1304 It was so
treated by mediaeval councils when practised by Christians and the contrary
opinion was pronounced heretical by the oecumenical council of Vienne. Geiler
of Strassburg expounded the official church view when he pronounced usury
always wicked. It was wrong for a Christian to take back more than the original
principal. And the substitution of a pig or some other gift in place of a money
payment he also denounced.

The rates of the Jews were
exorbitant. In Florence, they were 20% in 1430 and, in 1488, 32½%.1305 In Northern Europe they were much higher, from 431/3 to 80 or even 100%.
Municipalities borrowed. Clerics, convents and churches mortgaged their sacred
vessels. City after city in Germany and Switzerland expelled the Jews,—from
Spires and Zürich,1435, to Geneva,1490, and Nürnberg, Ulm and
Nördlingen,1498–1500. The careers of the great banking-houses in the second
half of the fifteenth century show the extensive demand for loans by popes and
prelates, as well as secular princes.

To afford relief to the needy,
whose necessities forced them to borrow, a measure of real philanthropy was
conceived in the last century of the Middle Ages, the montes pietatis, or charitable accumulations.1306 They were benevolent loaning funds. The idea found widespread
acceptance in Italy, where the first institutions were founded at Perugia,1462,
and Orvieto,1463. City councils aided such funds by contributions, as at
Perugia, when it gave 3,000 gulden. But in this case, finding itself unable to
furnish the full amount, it mulcted the Jews for 1,200 gulden, Pius II. giving
his sanction to the constraint. In cases, bishops furnished the capital, as at
Pistoja,1473, where Bishop Donato de’ Medici gave 3,000 gulden. At Lucca, a
merchant, who had grown rich through commercial affiliation with the Jews,
donated the princely capital of 40,000 gold gulden. At Gubbio, a law taxed all
inheritances one per cent in favor of the local fund, and neglect to pay was
punished with an additional tax of one per cent.

The popes showed a warm interest
in the new benevolence by granting to particular funds their sanction and
offering indulgences to contributors. From 1463 to 1515 we have records of 16
papal authorizations from such popes as Pius II., Sixtus IV., Innocent VIII.,
Alexander VI., Julius II. and Leo X. The sanction of Innocent VIII., given to the
Mantua fund,1486, called upon the preachers to summon the people to support the
fund, promised 10 years full indulgence to donors, and excommunicated all who
opposed the project. Sixtus IV., in commending the fund for his native town of
Savona,1479, pronounced its worthy object to be to aid not only the poor but
also the rich who had pawned their goods. He offered a plenary indulgence on
the collection of every 100 gulden. In 1490, the Savona fund had 22,000 gulden
and the limit of loans was raised to 100 ducats.1307

The administration of these
bureaus of relief was in the hands of directors, usually a mixed body of
clergymen and laymen, and often appointed by municipal councils. The accounts
were balanced each month. In Perugia, the rate, which was 12% in 1463, was
reduced to 8% a year later. In Milan it was reduced from 10% to 5%, in 1488.
Five per cent was the appointed rate fixed at Padua, Vicenza and Pisa, and 4%
at Florence. The loans were made upon the basis of property put in pawn. The
benevolent efficacy of these funds cannot be questioned and to them, in part,
is due the reduction of interest from 40% to 4 and 10% in Italy, before the
close of the 15th century.1308 They met,
however, with much opposition and were condemned as contravening the
traditional law against usury.

A foremost place in advancing
the movement was taken by the Franciscans and in the Franciscan Bernardino da
Feltre,1439–1494, it had its chief apostle. This popular orator canvassed all
the greater towns of Northern Italy,—Mantua, Florence, Parma, Padua, Milan,
Lucca, Verona, Brescia. Wherever he went, he was opposed from the pulpit and by
doctors of the canon law. At Florence, so warmly was the controversy conducted
in the pulpits that a public discussion was ordered at which Lorenzo de’
Medici, doctors of the law, clerics and many laymen were present, with the
result that the archbishop forbade opposition to the mons on pain of
excommunication. The Deuteronomic injunction, 24:12 sq., ordering that, if a
man borrow a coat, it should be restored before sundown and the Lord’s words,
Luke 6, were quoted by the opposition. But it was replied, that the object of
loaning to the poor was not to enrich the fund or individuals but to do the
borrower good. Savonarola gave the institution his advocacy.1309 The Fifth Lateran commended it and in this it was followed, 50
years later, by the Council of Trent.

The attempt to transplant the
Italian institution in Germany was unsuccessful and was met by the
establishment of banks by municipal councils, as at Frankfurt.1310 In England also, it gained no foothold. So strong was the feeling
against lending out money at interest that, at Chancellor Morton’s importunity,
parliament proceeded against it with severe measures, and a law of Henry VII.’s
reign made all lending of money at interest a criminal offence and the bargain
between borrower and lender null and void.

Notable expression was also
given to the practice of benevolence by the religious brotherhoods of the age.
These organizations developed with amazing rapidity and are not to be
confounded with the gilds which were organizations of craftsmen, intended to
promote the production of good work and also to protect the master-workers in
their monopoly of trade. They were connected with the Church and were, in part,
under the direction of the priesthood, although from some of them, as in
Lübeck, priests were distinctly excluded. Like the gilds, their organization
was based upon the principle of mutual aid1311but they emphasized the
principle of unselfish sympathy for those in distress. Luther once remarked,
there was no chapel and no saint without a brotherhood. In fact, nothing was so
sure to make a saint popular as to name a brotherhood after him. By 1450, there
was not a mendicant convent in Germany which had not at least one fraternity
connected with it. Cities often had a number of these organizations. Wittenberg
had 21, Lübeck 70, Frankfurt 31, Hamburg 100. Every reputable citizen in German
cities belonged to one or more.1312 Luther belonged to 3 at Erfurt, the brotherhoods of St. Augustine,
St. Anna and St. Catherine.

The dead, who had belonged to
them, had the distinct advantage of being prayed for. Their sick were cared for
in hospitals, containing beds endowed by them. Sometimes they incorporated the
principle of mutual benefit or assurance societies, and losses sustained by the
living they made good. At Paderborn, in case a brother lost his horse, every
member contributed one or two shillings or, if he lost his house, his
fellow-members contributed three shillings each or a load of lumber.

As there were gilds of
apprentices as well as of master-workmen, so there were brotherhoods of the
poor and humble as well as of those in comfortable circumstances. Even the
lepers had fraternities, and one of these clans had fief rights to a spring at Wiesbaden.
So also had the beggars and cripples at Zülpich, founded 1454. The entrance fee
in the last case was 8 shillings, from which there was a reduction of one-half
for widows.1313

In the case of the Italian
brotherhoods, it is often difficult to distinguish between a society organized
for a benevolent purpose and a society for the cult of some saint. The gilds of
Northern Italy, as a rule, laid emphasis upon religious duties such as
attendance upon mass, confession of sins and refraining from swearing. The
Roman societies had their patron saints,—the blacksmith and workers in gold,
St. Eligius, the millers Paulinus of Nola, the barrel-makers St. James, the
inn-keepers St. Blasius and St. Julian, the masons St. Gregory the Great, the
barbers and physicians St. Cosmas and St. Damian, the painters St. Luke and the
apothecaries St. Lawrence. The popes encouraged the confraternities and
elevated some of them to the dignity of archfraternities, as St. Saviour in
Rome, the first to win this distinction. Florence was also good soil for
religious brotherhoods. At the beginning of the 16th century, there were no
less than 73 within its bounds, some of them societies of children.1314

Society did not wait for the
present age to apply the principle of Christian charity. The development of
organizations and bureaus in the 15th century was not carried as far as it is
to-day, and for the good reason that the same demand for it did not exist. The
cities were small and it was possible to carry out the practice of individual
relief with little fear of deception.

§ 80. The Sale of Indulgences.

Nowhere, except in the lives of
the popes themselves, did the humiliation of the Western Church find more
conspicuous exhibition than in the sale of indulgences. The forgiveness of sins
was bought and sold for money, and this sacred privilege formed the occasion of
the rupture of Western Christendom as, later, the Lord’s Supper became the
occasion of the chief division between the Protestant churches.

Originally an indulgence was the
remission of a part or all of the works of satisfaction demanded by the priest
in the sacrament of penance. This is the definition given by Roman Catholic
authorities to-day.1315 In the
13th century, it came to be regarded as a remission of the penalty of sin
itself, both here and in purgatory. At a later stage, it was regarded, at least
in wide circles, as a release from the guilt of sin as well as from its
penalty. The fund of merits at the Church’s disposition—thesaurus meritorum — as defined by Clement VI., in
1343, is a treasury of spiritual assets, consisting of the infinite merits of
Christ, the merits of Mary and the supererogatory merits of the saints, which
the Church uses by virtue of the power of the keys. One drop of Christ’s blood,
so it was argued, was sufficient for the salvation of the world, and yet Christ
shed all his blood and Mary was without stain. From the vast surplus
accumulation supplied by their merits, the Church had the right to draw in
granting remission to sinners from the penalties resulting from the commission
of sin. The very term "keys," it was said, implies a treasure which
is looked away and to which the keys give access.1316 The authority to grant indulgences was shared by the pope and the
bishops. The law of Innocent III., intended to check its abuse, restricted the
time for which bishops might grant indulgence to 40 days, the so-called quarantines. By the decree of Pius X.,
issued Aug. 28,1903, cardinals, even though they are not priests, may issue
indulgences in their titular churches for 200 days, archbishops for 100 and
bishops for 50 days.

The application of indulgence to
the realm of purgatory by Sixtus IV. was a natural development of the doctrine
that the prayers and other suffrages of the living inure to the benefit of the
souls in that sphere. As Thomas Aquinas clearly taught, such souls belong to
the jurisdiction of the Church on earth. And, if indulgences may be granted to
the living, certainly the benefit may be extended to the intermediate realm,
over which the Church also has control.

Sixtus’ first bull granting
indulgence for the dead was issued 1476 in favor of the church of Saintes. Here
was offered to those who paid a certain sum—certam pecuniam — for the benefit of the
building, the privilege of securing a relaxation of the sufferings of the
purgatorial dead, parents for their children, friend for friend. The papal
deliverance aroused criticism and in a second bull, issued the following year,
the pontiff states that such relaxations were offered by virtue of the fulness
of authority vested in the pope from above plenitudo potestatis — to draw upon the fund of
merits..1317

To the abuse, to which this
doctrine opened the door, was added the popular belief that letters of
indulgence gave exemption both from the culpability and penalty of sin. The
expression, "full remission of sins," plena or plenissima remissio peccatorum, is found again and again in
papal bulls from the famous Portiuncula indulgence, granted by Honorius III. to
the Franciscans, to the last hours of the undisputed sway of the pope in the
West. It was the merit of the late Dr. Lea to have called attention to this
almost overlooked element of the mediaeval indulgence. Catholic authorities of
to-day, as Paulus and Beringer, without denying the use of the expression, a poena et culpa, assert that it was not the
intent of any genuine papal message to grant forgiveness from the guilt of sin
without contrition of heart.1318 The expression was in current use in tracts and in common talk.1319 John of Paltz, in his Coelifodina, an elaborate defence of indulgences written towards
the close of the 15th century, affirmed that an indulgence is given by virtue
of the power of the keys whereby guilt is remitted and penalty withdrawn. These
keys open the fund of the Church to its sons.1320 Luther was only expressing the popular view when, writing to
Albrecht of Mainz,1517, he complained that men accepted the letters of
indulgence as giving them exemption from all penalty and guilt—homo per istas indulgentias
liber sit ab omni poena et culpa. Not only on the Continent but also in England were
such forms of indulgence circulated. For example, Leo X.’s indulgence for the
hospital S. Spirito in Rome ran in its English translation, "Holy and
great indulgence and pardon of plenary remission a culpa et poena."1321 The popular mind did not stop to make the fine distinction between
guilt and its punishment and, if it had, it would have been quite satisfied to
be made free from the sufferings entailed by sin. If by a papal indulgence a
soul in purgatory could be immediately released and given access to heavenly
felicity, the question of guilt was of no concern.

Long before the days of Tetzel,
Wyclif and Huss had condemned the use of the formula, "from penalty and
guilt," as did also John Wessel. In denouncing the bulls of indulgence for
those joining in a crusade against Ladislaus, issued 1412, Huss copied Wyclif
almost word for word.1322 Wyclif
fiercely condemned the papal assumption in granting full indulgence for the
crusade of Henry de Spenser. Priests, he asserted, have no authority to give
absolution without proper works of satisfaction and all papal absolution is of
no avail, where the offenders are not of good and worthy life. If the pope has
power to absolve unconditionally, he should exercise his power to excuse the
sins of all men. The English Reformer further declared that, to the Christian
priest it was given, to do no more than announce the forgiveness of sins just
as the old priests pronounced a man a leper or cured of leprosy, but it was not
possible for him to effect a cure. He spoke of, the fond fantasy of spiritual
treasure in heaven, that each pope is made dispenser of the treasure at his own
will, a thing dreamed of without ground."1323 Such power would make the pope master of the saints and Christ
himself. He condemned the idea that the pope could "clear men of pain and
sin both in this world and the other, so that, when they die, they flee to
heaven without pain. This is for blind men to lead blind men and both to fall
into the lake." As for the
pardoning of sin for money, that would imply that righteousness may be bought
and sold. Wyclif gave it as a report, that Urban VI. had granted an indulgence
for 2,000 years.1324

Indulgences found an assailant
in Erasmus, howbeit a genial assailant. In his Praise of Folly, he spoke
of the "cheat of pardons and indulgences." These lead the priests to compute the time of each soul’s
residence in purgatory and to assign them a longer or shorter continuance
according as the people purchase more or fewer of these salable exemptions. By
this easy way of purchasing pardon any notorious highwayman, any plundering
bandit or any bribe-taking judge may for a part of their unjust gains secure
atonement for perjuries, lusts, bloodsheds, debaucheries and other gross
impieties and, having paid off arrears, begin upon a new score. The popular
idea was no doubt stated by Tyndale in answer to Sir Thomas More when he said,
that "men might quench almost the terrible fire of hell for three
halfpence."1325

It is fair to say that, while
the last popes of the Middle Ages granted a great number of indulgences, the
exact expression, "from guilt and penalty," does not occur in any of
the extant papal copies1326although some of their expressions seem fully to
imply the exemption from guilt. Likewise, it must be said that they also
contain the usual expressions for penitence as a condition of receiving the
grace—"being truly penitent and confessing their sins"—vere
poenitentibus et confessio.

Indulgences in the last century
of the Middle Ages were given for all sorts of benevolent purposes, crusades
against the Turks, the building of churches and hospitals, in connection with
relics, for the rebuilding of a town desolated by fire, as Brüx, for bridges
and for the repair of dikes, such an indulgence being asked by Charles V. The
benefits were received by the payment of money and a portion of the receipts,
from 33% to 50%, was expected to go to Rome. The territory chiefly, we may say
almost exclusively, worked for such enterprises was confined to the Germanic
peoples of the Continent from Switzerland and Austria to Norway and Sweden.
England, France and Spain were hardly touched by the traffic. Cardinal Ximenes
set forth the damage done to ecclesiastical discipline by the practice and, as
a rule, it was under other pretexts that papal moneys were received from
England.1327

In the transmission of the papal
portions of the indulgence-moneys, the house of the Fuggers figures
conspicuously. Sometimes it charged 5%, sometimes it appropriated amounts not
reckoned strictly on the basis of a fixed per cent. The powerful banking-firm,
also responding cheerfully to any request made to them, often secured the grant
of indulgences in Rome. The custodianship of the chests, into which the
indulgence-moneys were cast, was also a matter of much importance and here also
the Fuggers figured prominently. Keys to such chests were often distributed to
two or three parties, one of whom was apt to be the representative of the
bankers.

Among the more famous
indulgences for the building of German churches were those for the construction
of a tower in Vienna,1514, for the rebuilding of the Cathedral of Constance,
which had suffered great damage from fire,1511, the building of the Dominican
church in Augsburg,1514, the restoration of the Cathedral of Treves,1515, and
the building of St. Annaberg church,1517, in which Duke George of Saxony was
much interested. One-half of the moneys received for these constructions went
to Rome. In most of these cases, the Fuggers acted as agents to hold the keys
of the chest and transmit the moneys to the papal exchequer. The sees of
Constance, Chur, Augsburg and Strassburg were assigned as the territory in
which indulgences might be sold for the cathedral in Constance. No less than
four bulls of indulgence were issued in 1515 for the benefit of Treves,
including one for those who visited the holy coat which was found 1512 and was
to be exhibited every 7 years.1328

Among the noted hospitals to
which indulgences were issued—that is, the right to secure funds by their
sale—were hospitals in Nürnberg,1515, Strassburg,1518 and S. Spirito,
Rome,1516.

Both of the churches in
Wittenberg were granted indulgences and a special indulgence was issued for the
reliquary-museum which the elector Frederick had collected. An indulgence of
100 days was attached to each of the 5,005 specimens and another 100 to each of
the 8 passages between the cases that held them. With the 8,133 relics at Halle
and the 42 entire bodies, millions and billions of days of indulgence were
associated, a sort of anticipation of the geologic periods moderns demand. To
be more accurate, these relics were good for pardons covering 39,245,120 years
and 220 days and the still further period of 6,540,000 quarantines, each of 40
days.

In Rome, the residence of the
supreme pontiffs, as we might well have expected, the offer of indulgences was
the most copious, almost as copious as the drops on a rainy day. According to
the Nürnberger relic-collector, Nicolas Muffel, every time the skulls of the
Apostles were shown or the handkerchief of St. Veronica, the Romans who were
present received a pardon of 7,000 days, other Italians 10,000 and foreigners
14,000. In fact, the grace of the ecclesiastical authorities was practically
boundless. Not only did the living seek indulgences, but even the dying
stipulated in their wills that a representative should go to Assisi or Rome or
other places to secure for their souls the benefit of the indulgences offered
there.

Prayers also had remarkable
offers of grace attached to them. According to the penitential book, The
Soul’s Joy, the worshipper offering its prayers to Mary received 11,000
years indulgence and some prayers, if offered, freed 15 souls from purgatory
and as many earthly sinners from their sins. It professed to give one of
Alexander Vl.’s decrees, according to which prayer made three times to St. Anna
secured 1,000 years indulgence for mortal sins and 20,000 for venial. The
Soul’s Garden claimed that one of Julius II.’s indulgences granted 80,000
years to those who would pray a prayer to the Virgin which the book gave. No
wonder Siebert, a Roman Catholic writer, is forced to say that "the whole
atmosphere of the later Middle Ages was soaked with the indulgence-passion."1329

An indulgence issued by
Alexander VI., in 1502, was designed to secure aid for the knights of the
Teutonic Order against the Russians. The latter was renewed by Julius II. and
Cologne, Treves, Mainz, Bremen, Bamberg and other sees were assigned as the
territory. Much money was collected, the papal treasury receiving one-third of
the returns. The preaching continued till 1510 and Tetzel took a prominent part
in the campaign.1330

It remains to speak of the most
important of all of the indulgences, the indulgence for the construction of St.
Peter’s in Rome. This interest was pushed by two notable popes, Julius II. and
Leo X., and called forth the protest of Luther, which shook the power of the
papacy to its foundations. It seems paradoxical that the chief monument of
Christian architecture should have been built in part out of the proceeds of
the scandalous traffic in absolutions.

On April 18,1506, soon after the
laying of the cornerstone of St. Peter’s, Julius II. issued a bull promising
indulgence to those who would contribute to its construction, fabrica, as it was called. Eighteen
months later, Nov. 4,1507, he commissioned Jerome of Torniello, a Franciscan Observant,
to oversee the preaching of the bull in the so-called 25 Cismontane provinces,
which included Northern Italy, Austria, Bohemia and Poland. By a later decree
Switzerland was added.1331 Germany
was not included and probably for the reason that a number of indulgence bulls
were already in force in most of its territory. A special rescript appointed
Warham, archbishop of Canterbury, as chief overseer of the business in England.
At Julius’ death, the matter was taken up by Leo X. and pushed.

The preaching of indulgences in
Germany for the advantage of St. Peter’s began in the pontificate of Leo X. and
is closely associated with the elevation of Albrecht of Hohenzollern to the
sees of Mainz, Magdeburg and Halberstadt. Albrecht, a brother of Joachim,
elector of Brandenburg, was chosen in 1513 to the archbishopric of Magdeburg
and the bishopric of Halberstadt. The objections on the ground of his age and
the combination of two sees—a thing, however, which was true of Albrecht’s
predecessor—were set aside by Leo X., after listening to the arguments made by
the German embassies.

In 1514, Albrecht was further
honored by being elected archbishop of Mainz. The last incumbent, Uriel of
Gemmingen, died the year before. The archdiocese had been unfortunate with its
bishops. Berthold of Henneberg had died 1504 and James of Liebenstein in 1508.
These frequent changes necessitated a heavy burden of taxation to enable the
prelates to pay their tribute to the Holy See, which amounted to 10,000 ducats
in each case, with sundry additions. By the persuasion of the elector Joachim
and the Fuggers, Leo sanctioned Albrecht’s election to the see of Mainz. He was
given episcopal consecration and thus the three sees were joined in the hands
of a man who was only 24.

But Albrecht’s confirmation as
archbishop was not secured without the payment of a high price. The
price,10,000 ducats, was set by the authorities in Rome and did not originate
with the German embassy, which had gone to prosecute the case. The proposition
came from the Vatican itself and at the very moment the Lateran council was
voting measures for the reform of the Church. It carried with it the promise of
a papal indulgence for the archbishop’s territories. The elector Joachim
expressed some scruples of conscience over the purchase, but it went through.
Schulte exclaims that, if ever a benefice was sold for gold, this was true in
the case of Albrecht.1332

The bull of indulgences was
issued March 31,1516, and granted the young German prelate the right to dispose
of pardons throughout the half part of Germany, the period being fixed at 8
years. The bull offered, "complete absolution—plenissimam indulgentiam — and remission of all
sins," sins both of the living and the dead. A private paper, emanating
from Leo and dated two weeks later, April 15, mentions the 10,000 ducats
proposed by the Vatican as the price of Albrecht’s confirmation as having been
already placed in Leo’s hands.1333 To enable him to pay the full amount of 30,000 ducats his
ecclesiastical dignities had cost, Albrecht borrowed from the Fuggers and, to
secure funds, he resorted to a two-years’ tax of two-fifths which he levied on
the priests, the convents and other religious institutions of his dioceses. In
1517, "out of regard for his Holiness, the pope, and the salvation and
comfort of his people," Joachim opened his domains to the
indulgence-hawkers. It was his preaching in connection with this bull that won
for Tetzel an undying notoriety. Oldecop, writing in 1516, of what he saw, said
that people, in their eagerness to secure deliverance from the guilt and
penalty of sin and to get their parents and friends out of purgatory, were
putting money into the chest all day long.

The description of Tetzel’s sale
of indulgences and Luther’s protest are a part of the history of the
Reformation. It remains, however, yet to be said, as belonging to the mediaeval
period, that the grace of indulgences was popularly believed to extend to sins,
not yet committed. Such a belief seems to have been encouraged by the pardon-preachers,
although there is no documentary proof that any papal authorities made such a
promise. In writing to the archbishop of Mainz, Oct. 31,1517, Luther had
declared that it was announced by the indulgence-hawkers that no sin was too
great to be covered by the indulgence, nay, not even the sin of violating the
Virgin, if such a thing had been possible. And late in life,1541, the Reformer
stated that the pardoner "also sold sins to be committed."1334 The story ran that a Saxon knight went to Tetzel and offered him
10 thaler for a sin he had in mind to commit. Tetzel replied that he had full
power from the pope to grant such an indulgence, but that it was worth 80
thaler. The knight paid the amount, but some time later waylaid Tetzel and took
all his indulgence-moneys from him. To Tetzel’s complaints the robber replied,
that thereafter he must not be so quick in giving indulgence from sins, not yet
committed.1335

The traffic in ecclesiastical
places and the forgiveness of sins constitutes the very last scene of mediaeval
Church history. On the eve of the Reformation, we have the spectacle of the
pope solemnly renewing the claim to have rule over both spheres, civil and
ecclesiastical, and to hold in his hand the salvation of all mankind, yea, and
actually supporting the extravagant luxuries of his worldly court with moneys
drawn from the trade in sacred things. How deep-seated the pernicious principle
had become was made manifest in the bull which Leo issued, Nov. 9,1518, a full
year after the nailing of the Theses on the church door at Wittenberg, in which
all were threatened with excommunication who failed to preach and believe that
the pope has the right to grant indulgences.1336

*Schaff, Philip, History of
the Christian Church, (Oak Harbor, WA: Logos Research Systems, Inc.) 1997.
This material has been carefully compared, corrected¸ and emended (according to
the 1910 edition of Charles Scribner's Sons) by The Electronic Bible Society,
Dallas, TX, 1998.

1137 Janssen, I. 726. Bezold, p. 83, certainly goes far, when he makes
the unmodified statement, that the convents were high schools of the most
shameful immorality—Hochschulen der gräuelichsten Unsittlichkeit.

1139 Die jungen Mönchlein, he said, und
Nönnlein die du machest, die werden Huren und Buben. The young monks and nuns will
become harlots and rascals. I have not spoken of that custom of mediaeval lust,
the jus primae
noctis or droit de marquette as it was called, whereby the
feudal lord had the privilege of spending the first night with all brides.
Spiritual lords in Southern France, having domains, did not shrink, in cases,
from demanding the same privilege. Lea: Celibacy, I. 441.

1143 Capes: Engl. Ch. in the 14th and 15th Centt., p. 259, says
that many of the clergy were actually married.

1144 Seebohm, p. 76. For Hutton’s summary of the Norwich visitation,
see Traill: Social Engl., II. 467 sqq. He concludes that "if the
religious did little good, they did no harm." But see same volume, p. 565,
for the charge against the priests of Gloucester.

1145 Froude puts the composition of this tract in 1528. The 16th
complaint runs: "Who is she that will set her hands to work to get 3 pence
a day and may have at least 20 pence a day to sleep an hour with a friar, a
monk or a priest. Who is she that would labor for a groat a day and may have at
least 12 pence a day to be a bawd to a priest, monk or friar?"

1147 Dr. Tulloch says in his Luther and other Leaders of the
Reformation, "Nowhere else had the clergy reached such a pitch of
flagrant and disgraceful iniquity and the Roman Catholic religion such an utter
corruption of all that is good as in Scotland."

1148 Bernard in Migne, 182:889, Th. Aq. Summa, II. 2, q. 189.
Denifle, Luther und Lutherthum, I. 208, makes the monstrous
charge of deliberate lying and knavery against Luther for his treatment of
monkish baptism. Kolde: Denifle’s Beschimpfung M. Luthers, Leipz., 1904, pp. 33-49, shows
the justice of Luther’s representations. Their truth is not affected by the
statement of Joseph Ries: Das geistiche Leben nach der Lehre
d. hl. Bernard,
p. 86, namely that Bernard and the Church held that outside the convents there
may be some who are in the state of perfection while inside cloistral walls
there maybe those who are in the imperfect state.

1152 Cruel, pp. 647, 652, closes his treatment of the German pulpit in
the M. A. with the observation that the old view, reducing the amount of
preaching in Germany in the 15th century, must be abandoned. Cruel’s view is
now generally accepted by Protestant writers.

1156 A remarkable specimen of his power to play on words is given in
his use of the word Affe, monkey, which he applied to ten different
classes of the devil’s dupes. See Cruel, p. 543. Bischof, bishop, he
derived from Beiss-schaf —bite-sheep—because prelates bit the sheep
instead of taking them to pasture.

1160 See Cruel’s chapter on pulpit polemics, pp. 617-629 and Janssen,
I. 440 sqq. A preacher in Ulm, John Capistran, about 1450, was put by the
aldermen in the lock-up for his excessive vehemence in condemning the
prevailing luxury in dress and other questionable social customs.

1165 This group of men forms the subject of Ullmann’s notable work The
Reformers before the Reformation published in 1841. He followed Flacius,
Walch and others before him who had treated them as precursors of the
Reformation. Hase: Kirchengesch., II. 551; Köstlin: Leben Luthers, I. 18; Funk,
p. 382, and others still hold to this classification. Loofs: Dogmengesch., p. 658, takes another view
and says "they were not Reformers before the Reformation, nevertheless
they bear witness that, in the closing years of the Middle Ages, the
preparation made for the Reformation was not, merely negative." Janssen,
I. 745, treats them as followers of Huss.

1166 Goch’s words are Sola scriptura canonica fidem indubiam et irrefragabilem
habet auctoritatem. The writer in Wetzer-Welte concedes Goch’s depreciation of the
Schoolmen and of Thomas Aquinas in particular, whom at one point Goch calls a
prince of error—princeps
erroris.

1167 Ullmann, I. 91, 149 sqq., asserts that Goch stated the doctrine of
justification by faith alone. Clemen and the writer in Wetzer-Welte modify this
judgment. Walch, as quoted by Ullmann, p. 150, gives 9 points in which Goch
anticipated the Reformation.

1168 Catholic writers like Funk, p. 390, Wetzer-Welte and Janssen, I.
746, speak of Wesel as one of the false teachers of the Middle Ages and find
many of the doctrines of the Reformation in his writings.

1173 In a letter accompanying the gift, Honius wrote that the words
"This is my body" meant "This represents my body." For
Luther’s reply, see Köstlin: Luthers Leben, I. 701. For the lat edd. of
Wessel’s works, see Doedes, pp. 435, 442. Doedes in Studien u.
Kritiken, for
1870, p. 409, asks, "Who in the latter half of the 15th cent. had so much
genuine faith and evangelical knowledge as this man who was always the scholar
of the Lord Jesus Christ and nothing else?"

1174 The translation is from Schottmüller, pp. 2, 3. This writer gives
two of Savonarola’s letters to his mother.

1175 The one, the Vulgate printed in Basel, 1491, the other in Venice,
1492. See Luotto: Dello Studio, etc. This author draws a parallel
between Leo XIII.’s commendation of the study of the Bible and Savonarola’s
emphasis upon it as the seat of authority.

1176 Sermon, March 14, 1498. Schottmüller, p. 111. Roscoe: Life of
Lorenzo, ch. VIII., says: "The divine word from the lips of
Savonarola, descended not amongst his audience like the dews of heaven. It was
the piercing hail, the sweeping whirlwind, the destroying sword."

1178 So Nov. 1, 1494, etc. See Schottmüller, p. 28 sqq. The motto, cito et velociter, was repeated to Savonarola by
the Virgin in his vision of heaven, 1495.

1179 Rudelbach, pp. 333-346, presents an elaborate statement of
Savonarola’s attitude to the Bible, and quotes from one of his sermons on the
Exodus thus: "The theologians of our time have soiled everything by their
unseemly disputations as with pitch. They do not know a shred of the Bible,
yea, they do not even know the names of its books."

1181 Luotto asserts that the dilemma is presented of the genuineness of
Savonarola’s predictions or downright imposture and he boldly supports the
former view. Pastor, Villari, Lucas and others show that we are not narrowed
down to this dilemma.

1182 In his first letter to Savonarola July 21, 1495. See the text in
O’Neil, p. 10 sqq. Savonarola’s reply, p. 26 sqq.

1184 This is the view of Lucas, pp. 69 sq., Pastor, Creighton, III.
248, who pronounces "the prophetic claims a delusion," and Villari.
The last author says, I. 362 sqq., "Is it not possible that Savonarola was
intoxicated by the feeling that the earlier predictions had been fulfilled, and,
as the difficulty of maintaining his position in Florence in the last years of
his life increased, he felt forced to appeal more and more to this endowment as
though it were real?" Rudelbach gives a long chapter to Savonarola’s
prophecies, pp. 281-333. Pastor discusses Savonarola’s alleged prophetic gift
thoroughly in his Gesch. d. Päpste, III. 146 sqq., and in refutation of Luotto in
his Zur Beurtheilung.

1185 So Pastor, III. 141. The account given of Lorenzo’s interview with
Savonarola is based upon Burlamacchi and Mirandola. Politian, in a letter to
Jacopo Antiquario, gave a different amount of the three demands and made no
mention of Savonarola’s demand that Florence be restored her liberties. He also
added that Savonarola left the room pronouncing upon the dying man a blessing.
Politian’s version is accepted by Roscoe, ch. X., Creighton, III. 296-299 and
Lucas, 83 sq. The version given above is accepted by Villari, 168 sqq., W.
Clark, p. 116, and the rigid critic Hase, p. 20. Ranke did not see his way
clear to deny its truth and Reumont, II. 443, who denied it in the 1st ed. of
his Lorenzo de’ Medici, hesitates in the 2d ed. Pastor proceeds upon the basis
of its truth but expresses doubt in a note.

1186 One of Savonarola’s propositions was to levy taxes on real
property alone and, it seems, he was not averse to taxing Church property.
Landucci, p. 119; Villari, I. 269, 298; II. 81.

1187 See the document in Lucas, p. 180, and O’Neil, p. 9 sq. The
original in Rudelbach.

1189 The Italian text in Perrens, I. 471 sq. The sermons of this period
were on Amos, Zachariah, Micah and Ruth. According to Burlamacchi, the sultan
had some of them translated into Turkish. Villari, II. 87.

1197 For the originals, see Perrens, I. 487-492. Excerpts are given by
Villari, II. 292 sq. See also Hase, p. 59, Creighton, III. 237. Of the
genuineness of the letters, Villari says there can be no doubt.

1201 Schnitzer, p. 64 sq., who goes into the matter at length, and
Villari, II. 306 sqq., agree in the opinion that Alexander fully sympathized
with the ordeal. They also agree that the Arrabbiati were largely, if not
wholly, responsible for the suggestion of the ordeal and making it a matter of
public appointment. Pastor, III. 429, represents Alexander as wholly
disapproving the ordeal.

1202 There is a difference among the contemporary writers about the
figures. Landucci, p. 168, gives the length at 50 braccia, width 10 and
height 4; Bartolomeo Cerretaui, Schnitzer ed. p. 62, the width as 1 braccio and
the height 2.

1203 Schnitzer, p. 159 sq., who says the signory and the Franciscans
joined "in packing the cards."

1205 The reports of Savonarola’s trial and confessions are of uncertain
value, as they were garbled by the reporter Ser Ceccone. See Pastor, III. 432
sq. Landucci says that from 9 A. M. till nightfall the cries of Domenico and
Sylvestro under the strain of torture could be heard in the city prison.

1206 See the miserable letters sent by the papal commission to
Alexander, Lucas, pp. 434-436.

1207 Weimar ed. XII. 248. Twenty-three edd. of Savonarola’s exposition
appeared within two years of the author’s death and, before half a century
elapsed, it had been translated into Spanish, German, English and French. In
Italy, it was used as a tract and put into the hands of prisoners condemned to
death. It was embodied in the Salisbury Primer,1538, and in Henry VIII.’s
Primer,1543.

1209 Pastor, III. 436 says that Savonarola was always true to Catholic
dogma in theory. His only departure was disobeying the pope and appealing to a
council. Father Proctor, Pref. to Triumph of the Cross, p. xvii, calls
Savonarola "Of Catholics the most Catholic."

1210 Cardinal Capecelatro in his Life of St. Ph. Neri. trsl. by
Father Pope, I. 278, says, "Philip often read Savonarola’s writings
especially the Triumph of the Cross, and used them in the instruction of
his spiritual children." Quoted by Proctor, Preface, p. 6. For Catherine
de Ricci, see her Life by F. M. Capes, Lond.,1908, pp. 48, 49, 53,270
sq. She was devoted in her cult of Savonarola and wrote a laud to him. This was
the chief objection to her beatification in 1716, but the arguments for an
unfavorable judgment of Savonarola were answered on that occasion.

1211 Villari, II. 417, following Schwab and other Catholic writers. The
interpretation put upon Benedict’s words is denied by Pastor: Beurtheilung,
p. 16 sq., and Lucas.

1212 Father O’Neil, a Dominican, in his work, Was Savonarola really
excommunicated? takes this position and says, p. 132, "Alexander did
not inflict any censure on Savonarola." The fact, however, is that in his
letters to the signory, Alexander proceeded on the basis of his brief of
excommunication. He stated distinctly the reasons for his being excommunicated
and he called upon the priests of Florence to publicly announce his sentence of
May 12,1497, upon pain of drawing ecclesiastical censure upon themselves.
O’Neil replies that a papal decision, based upon a false charge, is invalid, p.
175 sqq.

1213 Rechtlos hingemordert, Kirchengesch., p. 503. Ranke’s statement
that view making Savonarola a hero is a Dominican legend "worked out after
the preacher’s death" has been rendered untenable by the latest research
by the eminent Savonarola scholar, the Catholic Professor Schnitzer. See his Feuerprobe,
p. 152.

1214 Sermon VIII. in Prato ed. quoted by Rudelbach. Bayonne wrote his
work in 1879 to dispose of this charge and to prepare the way for Savonarola’s
canonization.

1221 The Obedience of a Christian Man, Parker Soc., p. 303 sq.
The author of the Epp. obscurorum virorum speaks of having listened to a lecture on poetry, in
which Ovid was explained naturaliter, literaliter, historialiter et spiritualiter. In his preface to the
Pentateuch, p. 394, Tyndale said, "The Scripture hath but one simple,
literal sense whose light the owls cannot abide."

1222 Lyra’s work was printed 8 times before 1500. The ed. printed at
Rome,1471-1473, is in 5 vols.

1229 Falk, pp. 24, 91-97, gives a full list with the places of issue.
Walther gives a list of 120 MSS. of the Bible in German translation. The Lenox
Library in New York has a copy of the Mazarin Bible. The first book bearing
date, place and name of printers was the Psalterium issued by Fust and
Schöffer, Aug. 14,1457. See Copinger: Incunabula biblica or the First Half Century of the
Latin Bible,
Lond.,1892.

1230 Often only a brief selection of Psalms was given. Such collections
were meant as manuals of devotion and perhaps also to be used In memorizing.
See Falk, p. 28 sqq.

1231 Falk, p. 32. The word postilla comes from post illa verba sicut textus evangelii and its use goes back to the
13th century.

1232 Janssen, I. 23, 75 attempts to establish it as a fact that the
copies struck off were numerous. He cites in confirmation the edition of the
Latin Grammar of Cochlaeus,1511, which included 1,000 copies, and of a work of
Bartholomew Arnoldi, 1517, 2,000 copies. Sebastian Brant declared that all
lands were full of the Scriptures, and the Humanist, Celti, that the priests
could find a copy in every inn if they chose to look. 6,000 copies of Tyndale’s
New Testament were printed in a single edition. The Koberger firm of Nürnberg
has the honor of having produced no less than 26 editions, 1476-1520. Its
Vulgate was on sale in London as early as 1580.

1238 Falk, p. 18. Janssen, I. 72, is careful to tell that the peasant,
Hans Werner, who could read, knew his Bible so well by heart that he was able
to give the places where this text and that were found.

1242 Reuss, p. 534. The last four editions of the old German Bible were
1490, Augsburg, 1494, Lübeck, Augsburg, 1508, 1518.

1243 We might have expected some definite utterance in regard to Bible
translations from Pecock, in his Repressor of Overmuch Blaming of the Clergy,
1450-1460. What he says is in the progress of his refutation of the Lollards’
position that all things necessary to be believed and done are to be found in
the Scriptures. He adds, Rolls Series, I. 119, "And thou shalt not find
expressly in Holy Scripture that the New and Old Testaments should be writ in
English tongue to laymen or in Latin tongue to clergy."

1244 Pref. to the Pentateuch, Parker Soc. ed., Tyndale’s Doctr.
Works, p. 392. Arundel did not adduce any errors in Wyclif’s version. Abbot
Gasquet, in The Old Engl. Bible, p. 108, and Eve of the Reform.,
p. 209 sqq., attempts to show that the Bible was not a proscribed book in
England before the Reformation. The testimonies he adduces, commending the
Scriptures, are so painfully few as to seem to make his case a hopeless one.
Dixon, Hist. of the Ch. of Engl., I. 451, speaks of Arundel’s
"proclaiming the war of authority against English versions."

1245 Cochlaeus informed the English authorities of Tyndale’s presence
in Wittenberg and his proposed issue of the English N. T., in order to prevent
"the importation of the pernicious merchandise." Tonstall professed
to have discovered no less than 2000 errors in Tyndale’s N. T. See Fulke’s Defence
in Parker Soc. ed., p. 61. Tyndale, Pref. to the Pent., p. 373,
says, that "the papists who had found all their Scripture before in their
Duns or such like devilish doctrine, now spy out mistakes in my transl., even
if it be only the dot of an i."

1257 Gerson’s opp., Du Pin’s ed., III. 280. Luther, in the same
vein, said in 1516, Weimar ed., I. 450, 494, that, if there was to be a revival
in the Church, it must start with the instruction of the children. A single
book, corresponding to the manuals above described, has come down to us, from
an earlier period, the composition of a monk of Weissenberg of the 9th century.
See two Artt. on Catechisms in the Presb. Banner, Dec. 31, 1908, Jan. 7,
1909 by D. S. Schaff.

1258 Maskell: Monumenta ritualia, 2d ed., 1882, III., pp. ii-lxvii and a reprint of a Prymer, III 3-183.
Dr. Edward Barton edited three Primers, dating from 1535, 1539, 1546, Oxf.,
1834. See also Proctor’s Hist. of the Bk. of Com. Prayer, p. 14 sq.
Proctor calls the Primer "the book authorized for 150 years before the
Reformation by the Engl. Church, for the private devotion of the people."
A. W. Tuer: Hist. of the Horn Book, 2 vols., Lond., 1896. Highly illust.
and most beautiful vols.

1259 Maskell, III., pp. xxxv-xlix, says the word, Prymer, can be traced
to the beginning of the 14th century.

1260 Horn-books, as Mr. Tuer says, were much used in England, Scotland
and America, down to the close of the 18th century. So completely had they gone
out of use, that even Mr. Gladstone declared he knew "nothing at all about
them. Tuer, I., p. 8.

1263 William Dunbar, the Scotch poet, wrote with boisterous humor, The
Dance of the Sevin Deidlie Synnis (1507?), perhaps as a picture of a revel
held on Shrove Tuesday at the court. Each of the cardinal sins performed a
dance. Ward-Waller: Cambr. Hist. of Lit., II. 289, etc.

1264 In addition to the Lit. given in vol. V.: 1, p. 869, see F. E.
Schelling: Hist. of the Drama of Engl.,1558-1642, with a Résumé of the
Earlier Drama from the Beginning, Boston, 1908.

1265 Pollock gives 48 York guilds with plays assigned to each, pp.
xxxi-xxxiv. There are records of plays in more than 100 Engl. towns and
villages, Pollock, p. xxiii.

1266 Text in Pollock, p. 8 sqq. It was common to represent Noah’s
consort as a shrew. so Chaucer in the Miller’s Tale.

1267 The text in Pollock. It was revived in New York City in the Winter
of 1902-1903 and played in three theatres, creating a momentary interest.

1270 We have the account of the latter by an eye-witness, the
chronicler priest, Conrad Stolle of Erfurt. See Ficker, p. 69 sq.

1271 Bezold,105 sq., Janssen, I. 748. See an art., Relic worship in
the Heart of Europe, in the Presb. Banner, Sept. 16, 1909, by D. S.
Schaff on a visit to Einsiedeln, whither 160,000 pilgrims journeyed in 1908,
and to Aachen when the "greater relics," which are displayed once in
7 years, were exposed July 9-21, 1909, and according to the Frankfurt press
attracted 600,000 pilgrims.

1272 Janssen, I. 748-760, ascribes the popularity of pilgrimages in
Gemany to the currendi
libido, the
travelling itch.

1283 St. Anne’s day was fixed on July 26 by Gregory XIII.,1584. The
Western Continent has a great church dedicated to St. Anne at Beau Pré on the
St. Lawrence, near Quebec. It possesses one of its patron’s fingers. No other
Catholic sanctuary of North America, perhaps, has such a reputation for
miraculous cures as this Canadian church.

1284 Beautiful ruler of the king, Ruling him who rules all things.
Blume and Dreves, XLII. 115.

1290 The Cambridge Role, a MS. in Cambridge, contains 12 carols. John
of Dunstable founded a school of music early in the 15th century. Traill: Social
Engl., II. 368 sq. Maskell, Mon.rit., III. 1 sqq., gives a number of
English hymns printed In the Prymers of the first half of the 16th
century.

1293 Quoted by Uhlhorn, p. 439. Janssen, II. 325 sq., takes too
seriously Luther’s complaint that more liberality had been shown and care given
to the needy under the old system than under the new, using it as a proof of
the influence of Protestantism. Riezler, Gesch. Baierns, as quoted by
Janssen, I. 679 says, "The Christian spirit of love to one’s neighbor was
particularly active In the 15th century in works of benevolence and there Is
scarcely another age so fruitful In them." So also Bezold, p. 94.

1297 Uhlhorn, p. 333. For the conditions of admission to hospitals and
medical treatment, Allemand, III. 192 sqq. is to be consulted.

1298 In 1409 was founded an asylum for lunatics in Valencia, Lecky: Hist.
of Europ. Morals, II. 94 sq. There were pest-houses In Oxford and Cambridge
and Continental universities often had special hospitals of their own. Writing
of the 16th century, Thomas Platter speaks of such a hospital at Breslau. The
town paid 16 hellers for the care of each patient. These institutions were,
however, far removed from our present methods of cleanliness. Of the Breslau
hospital, Platter (Monroe’s Life, p. 103 sq.) says, "We had good
attention, good beds, but there were many vermin there as big as ripe
hemp-seed, so that I and others preferred to be on the floor rather than in the
beds."

1299 Geo. Pernet: Leprosy in Quart. Rev., 1903, p. 384 sqq. C.
Creighton, Soc. Engl., II. 413. This Hist., Vol. V., I., pp. 395,
825, 894. For the fearful prevalence of cutaneous diseases and crime in England
in the 13th century and as a cure for those who sigh for the fictitious happy
conditions of mediaeval society, see Jessopp, Coming of the Friars, p.
101 sqq.

1306 Other names given to them were montes Christi, monte della
carità, mare di pietà. See Holzapfel, pp. 18, 20, for funds to provide for
burial, montes
mortuorum, made
up from contributions, and funds to which mothers contributed at the birth of
children, called montes
dotis. Holzapfel
gives the primary authorities on the benevolent loaning funds, pp. 3-14.

1311 The constitution of the Gild of St. Mary of Lynn contained the
clauses, "If any sister or brother of this gild fall into poverty, they
shall have help from every other brother and sister in a penny a day." The
Gild of St. Catharine, London, had a similar stipulation. Smith: Engl. Gilds,
p. 185.

1315 So Paulus; J. Tetzel, p. 88, and Beringer, p. 2, a member
of the Society of Jesus, whose work on indulgences has the sanction of the
Congregation of Indulgences of the College of Cardinals. Both writers insist
that the indulgence does not confer forgiveness of guilt but only the remission
of penalty after guilt is forgiven. See also on the general subject this Hist.,
V. 1, pp. 735-748, VI. 146 sqq.

1317 For the text of the bulls, see Lea III. 585 sqq. and Köhler, pp.
37-40. A bull ascribed to Calixtus III., 1457, also sanctions indulgences for
the dead. It is accepted as genuine by Paulus. For Gabriel Biel’s acceptance of
Sixtus’ assertion of power to grant indulgences to the dead, see Köhler, p. 40.

1318 Paulus, 97 sq., and Beringer, p. 11, either explain the expression
to mean the penalty of guilt, as if it read a poena culpae delicta, or refer it to venial sins.
See Vol. V. 1, p. 741. The Jubilee bull of Boniface VIII., 1300, was
interpreted by a cardinal to include in its benefits guilt as well as penalty—duplex indulgentia culpae
videlicet et poenae. Köhler, p. 18 sq., gives the text of the bull. John XXIII. confessed to
have often absolved a culpa et poena.

1319 It was used by Piers Plowman (see Lea: Sacerd. Celibacy, I.
444), by Landucci, 1513, "l’indulgenza di colpa e pena, Badia’s ed., p. 341, by
Oldecop, 1516, who listened to Tetzel (see his letter in Paulus, p. 39), etc.
Oldecop said that those who cast their money into the chest and confessed their
sins were " absolved from all their sins and from pain and guilt."
For other cases and a general treatment of the subject, see Lea, III. 67-80

1321 See Maskell: Monum. rit., etc., III. 372 sqq. These
indulgences in England were printed on single sheets perhaps by Wynkyn de
Worde. Such an English reprint announced an indulgence of 2560 days granted by
Julius II. to all contributing to a crusade against the Saracens and other
Christian enemies.

1326 James of Jüterbock in his Tract. de indulg. about 1451 says
he did not recollect to have seen or read a single papal brief promising
indulgence a
poena et culpa.
Köhler, p. 48.

1327 For the details which follow, the treatment by Schulte, in his
work on the Fuggers, is the chief authority. This book contains a remarkable
array of figures and facts based on studies among the sources.

1328 Treves also boasted of a nail of the cross, the half part of St.
Peter’s staff and St Helena’s skull.

1331 In a pamphlet entitled Simia by Andrea Guarna da Salerno,
Milan, 1517, as quoted by Klaczko, Rome and the Renaissance, p. 25,
Bramante the architect was refused entrance to heaven by St. Peter for
destroying the Apostle’s temple in Rome, whose very antiquity called the least
devout to God. And when the heavenly porter charged him with a readiness to
destroy the very world itself and ruin the pope, the architect confessed and
declared that his failure was due to the fact that "Julius did not put his
hand Into his pocket to build the new church but relied on indulgences and the
confessional." Paris de Grassis called Bramante "the ruiner,"architectum Bramantem seu potius
Ruinantem.

1333 Schulte, I. 125. Leo’s bull of March 31 is given by Köhler, pp.
83-93. Even the Rom. Cath., Paulus, Tetzel, p. 31, goes as far as to
speak of "the miserable business which for both Leo and Albrecht was first
of all a financial transaction."

1334 An offer of this sort is referred to by John of Paltz (see
quotation in Paulus): Tetzel, p. 136, and Paulus’ attempt to explain it
away.

1335 One of the savory pulpit anecdotes bearing on indulgences ran as
follows: Certain pilgrims, on their journey, came to a tree on which 5 souls
were hanging. On their return, they found 4 had vanished. The one left behind
reported that his companions had been released by friends, but that he was
without a single friend. So, for the unfortunate soul’s benefit, one of the
pilgrims made a pilgrimage to Rome, and the soul at once took its flight to
heaven. "So may a soul," the moral went on to say, "be released
from purgatorial fire, if only 50 Pater nosters be said for it."